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Topic: Sinister Forces (Read 52534 times)

So, Peter Levenda, probably best known on this site for his hand in the publishing (and perhaps creation? he denies, but many still suspect) the Simon Necronomicon.

However, any truly dedicated follower of High Weirdness should probably be aware of his "Sinister Forces" trilogy, what Levenda refers to as "grimoires of American political witchcraft". In these books, he attempts to undertake this project:

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To what degree does mysticism (including occultism, religious organizations, and secret societies) influence politics? Can it be demonstrated that there is no real separation of church and state, despite most Americans’ belief? Can we show that the world’s political leaders are motivated by (at times bizarre and outrageous) religious or spiritual convictions, thus threatening at the least the very nature of the American way of life… and at the most American lives in general? Is politics a science? Is it an art? Or is it religion?

And for a man with Levenda's research skills and own...interesting history, which includes run-ins with intelligence officers, wandering bishops, longstanding involvement in the New York occult scene and an unwise quest for Colonia Dignidad, this project of research takes on a very unsettling and, indeed, worryingly sinister tone.

Below, I've included a number of notes from the first book of the trilogy, The Nine, with annotations by myself where I've considered necessary. I am currently working my way through the second and third books, and will post the notes from those in due course.

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I visited the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress and fell upon a treasure trove of documentation showing Nazi fascination with occult themes… to the extent of financing research in Tibet and hunting down the Grail. This became the central subject matter of my last book, Unholy Alliance. Here was a perfect example of a nation being ruled by what were called—in any other age—occult leaders and “spiritual” visionaries. From the swastika to the SS, the Nazis were little more than the 20th century’s best organized (and best dressed) cult. A political party? Please.

This is the real background to this project. Unholly Alliance made the argument that the Nazis were religious fanatics and a religious cult, not a mere political movement. Of course, any movement of sufficiently messianic qualities will eventually become a religious cause, but Levenda traces the particular occult influences on the Nazi Party and associated bodies, such as the Thule Society. Sinister Forces is essentially an attempt to extend this project to American history, with disturbingly successful results.

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During the Watergate era a somewhat unsettling revelation was made: that for twenty-five years (or more) the CIA had conducted psychological experimentation upon both volunteers and unwitting subjects—both at home and abroad—to find the key to the unconscious mind, to memory, and to volition. Their goal was to create the perfect assassin and to protect America from the programmed assassins of other countries. This project was known by the name MK-ULTRA, but it had its origins in earlier forms of the same “brainwashing” agenda: Operations BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. To me, this was astounding. A US government agency was conducting what—to a medievalist—could only be characterized as a search for the Philosopher’s Stone, for occult power, for magical spells and talismans. Indeed, some of the CIA’s subprojects included research among the psychics, the mediums, the magicians and the witches of America and beyond. And the Army was not far behind in its mind control testing, as we shall see. What was even more disturbing was the revelation that nearly all records of this incredible and superhumanly ambitious project were destroyed in 1973 on orders of CIA director Richard Helms himself. In his testimony, he claimed that MK-ULTRA did not come up with anything worthwhile, and that the project had been terminated. Then why were the documents shredded? We do not know who the test subjects were. We don’t know what was done to them. We don’t know how they have been programmed, if at all. We don’t know what they might do. Or what they have already done.

MK-ULTRA, and its associated projects, will of course form a large part of this story. Not the whole story, but a significant aspect of it.

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University of Chicago Professor Ioan Culianu was able to show that the technique of secret links and correspondences between objects and events discovered by a Renaissance magician—Giordano Bruno—are applicable to mind control and psychological warfare today. Charles Manson declared himself to be a reincarnation of Bruno, an oddly sophisticated choice for the nearly-illiterate convicted murderer. Professor Culianu himself was murdered in 1991, another crime that has never been solved.

And the second major obsession of this series is Charles Manson. Manson is almost a stand-in, a symbol for the logical reproduction of the state's actions on an individual level...though he's important for other reasons, as well.

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The victim was a nobody. An ex-con, once convicted of writing bad checks. A man down on his luck, working for a trucking company. He had been stabbed in a fury of nineteen slashing, slivering strokes—in a wood frame house in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning on a side street in a small country town—and no one heard a thing. The perpetrator left no clues, no identifiable fingerprints, nothing. The body might have lain there for days, except that the victim’s co-worker stopped by to see why he hadn’t shown up for work that morning. The body was found. The police were called. The officer who responded to that call and who was the first policeman at the scene is today the Chief of Police of Ashland, Kentucky. The murder took place in 1969. He told me it remains unsolved—and the murder open on the books—to this day. The victim’s name was Darwin Scott. He was the brother of one Colonel Scott. Colonel Scott had been sued—successfully—for paternity of a boy, one “No Name Maddox,” by a girlfriend and sometime prostitute, Kathleen Maddox. No Name Maddox would soon be known by another name. Charles Manson.

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It is a mystery. What happened to Manson in Chillicothe, that he suddenly became studious (he was still illiterate when he was transferred there), learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic, mellowed out, and became a star “prisoner”? His psychiatric reports were all negative up to that point; even during the first month at Chillicothe the doctors were despairing of him, believing that he needed a closed environment and not the relatively “open” ambience of Chillicothe. Then, suddenly, Manson became a different person and maintained that identity for over a year and a half, until his release. That degree of conscious control—especially in a disturbed, uneducated, illiterate, violent, criminal, sodomitic bastard child of an unmarried, alcoholic mother—is suspicious, if not alarming. Was Charlie “helped” by someone at Chillicothe?

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During this time, US government agencies were conducting medical tests among various inmate populations in America. Their most prized subjects were violent criminals—sociopaths like Charles Manson—whom they dosed with massive amounts of drugs to gauge personality changes, emotional response, and other parameters that have never been revealed.

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Taking stolen goods across state lines is, of course, a federal offense and Charlie was caught, as usual. Only this time, he had a pregnant seventeen-year-old wife. He drove a stolen car to Los Angeles, was apprehended, pled guilty, and asked the court for psychiatric help, for some reason referring back to his time in Chillicothe. The judge so ordered, and he was examined by Dr. Edwin Ewart McNiel in October 1955.

The implication here is fairly obvious: was Charles Manson experimented on during his time in Chillicothe? We can never really know, thanks to the destruction of MK-ULTRA files by Richard Helms. He also gets curiously sympathetic treatment from the legal system.

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At Terminal Island, Charles is tested again by prison psychiatrists. This time, his IQ has climbed to 121, a substantial improvement over his score at Chillicothe. His verbal skills have noticeably increased, and he enrolls in a Dale Carnegie course, only to quit after a few weeks out of either pique or boredom. When he is seen as trustworthy, he is transferred to a Coast Guard station which is minimal security, but he is found hot-wiring a car in the parking lot and is slammed back inside to serve the remainder of his term.

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During this time, Manson became involved with Scientology and it’s this interest that has fueled a lot of the speculation concerning other influences at work in Manson’s life. The creation of a small-time science fiction writer and would-be occultist, Scientology has been described as either a cult or a scam, or both, depending on which journalist, investigator or “survivor” you read. It has attracted celebrity membership, including John Travolta and Tom Cruise, as part of a concerted effort to win followers among Hollywood stars; it has also conspired against US Government agencies and been conspired against in turn. Its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was a former Navy officer with a history of mental problems. He was a colleague of Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist and follower of Aleister Crowley. All of this will be discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow, as it bears heavily on our thesis, but suffice it to say that Scientology in the early 1960s was just coming into its own, recruiting heavily on street corners, and had obviously penetrated the prison system as well. An offshoot of Scientology is the Process Church of the Final Judgment, and Manson was believed to have been involved with the Process as well.

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Manson was involved enough with Scientology at one point to have picked up the jargon and to pass himself off as a “clear”: someone who had passed through all of Scientology’s “deprogramming” levels and reached the stage where previous social, environmental, perhaps even genetic influences no longer had any effect on decision-making, emotional stability, etc. He had a Scientology “auditor” in prison, another Scientologist called Lanier Ramer, who—Manson claimed—brought him to the level of “clear” or, more accurately, “theta clear.”

Levenda doubts Manson actually made it to clear, given the usual amount of time this requires. But this is worth noting.

And there is this particular case, which was almost certainly a Manson-related murder, which deserves more scrutiny:

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There was Darwin Orell Scott in Ashland, Kentucky: Manson’s uncle and victim of an unsolved crime, carved with knives. And there was Marina Habe, a seventeen-year-old girl who was abducted on New Year’s Eve, 1968 and whose body was found—carved with knives—a few days later. Although attributed to the Manson “family,” the murder is still officially unsolved. But it was Marina Habe’s case that led me to a whole other dimension of the thesis I was working on. It was Marina Habe who led me back to World War II, to Operation Paperclip, to Hollywood, escaped Nazis, psychological warfare and the enigmatic team of Clay Shaw and Fred Crisman.

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On New Year’s Day, 1969, the petite body of Marina Elizabeth Habe was found nude at the bottom of a ravine off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, about four miles from home. The seventeen-year-old student at the University of Hawaii and aspiring actress was the victim of multiple stab wounds in the neck and chest, had been raped, burned, and had contusions in her eyes. It was a savage attack reminiscent of the later attack on Darwin Scott in Ashland, Kentucky. She had been returning from a date with friend John Hornburg in Brentwood the early morning of December 30, 1968 and was kidnapped from in front of the home she shared with her mother in the Hollywood hills after returning from a night out on Santa Monica Boulevard. The case remains unsolved, but there was a lot of speculation at the time that her killer was a Manson “family” member, since she was known to have befriended various members of the group. Manson himself has no alibi for the day and time of her death, and is known to have been in Los Angeles on the day she was kidnapped and killed, attending a New Year’s Eve party at the home of musician John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Phillips himself is known to have been friendly with elements of the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

Levenda then goes on to describe the background of Habe's father, who as it turns out, had a very illustrious history.

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As hostilities began with the accession of Hitler and the Nazi Party to a position of control within Germany, Habe found himself becoming a dedicated (some would say “rabid”) anti-Nazi. (It is to Hans Habe, in fact, that we credit the discovery of Hitler’s “Schicklegrueber” family background.) As war broke out, Habe found himself on Hitler’s enemies list: his books were burned, and he was shot at in Vienna (because of his publication of Hitler’s Schicklegrueber ancestry; Habe actually sent copies of his report to Germany at the time of Hitler’s campaign against Hindenburg in an effort to ridicule Hitler and cause him to lose the election, a tactic which was in vain as we all know). Habe enlisted with a group of foreign volunteers in the French Army, and took part in the Battle of France. He was captured on June 22, 1940, armed only with an 1891 Remington rifle. Habe—in his book about the experience, A Thousand Shall Fall—rails against the French complicity in the defeat, accusing the Vichy hierarchy of actually wanting to surrender rather than fight Germany. (This book eventually became the 1943 MGM propaganda film The Cross of Lorraine, starring Jean-Pierre Aumont, Gene Kelly, Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre and Hume Cronyn.) Held at a prison camp in Occupied France, Habe managed to survive for a few weeks under an assumed name before escaping, dressed in a German uniform and fleeing in an ambulance. He eventually made his way to Spain and Portugal, joining his wife—Erika Levy—in neutral Lisbon. President Roosevelt gave Habe a special emergency visa, and the couple arrived in New York harbor on December 3, 1940.

Further research suggests Habe made a significant contribution to the war effort:

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Psychological warfare officer? Italian front? The newsclipping gave the author a further dimension for his research, and also suggested a new line of inquiry. Let’s see where it leads us. Habe began giving talks at various clubs and societies in America during 1941, even staying for a while at West Point where, it is said, he continued to work at his writing. In 1942 he began a series of lectures at Army bases under the aegis of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations on “How To Lose a War”: an ironic title which took as its text the fall of France, and served as motivation for the American troops in their struggle against Nazism.

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Shortly thereafter, in January 1943, Habe enlisted in the US Army. This was not mere expedience, since he had dependents and would probably not have been called up, but he asked to enlist anyway. By July of that year, he was in North Africa (and the new father of a son) as a second lieutenant. He was then loaned to British General Montgomery for a while, and September found him in Italy and this time with the US forces. After that, the record becomes a little confused. Some reports have him landing with Allied forces at D-Day, yet he seems to have entered Europe via Italy nine months earlier than that. Regardless of the order of events, by that time Habe was working for C.D. Jackson—more famous in his Time-Life incarnation—and was actively involved in psychological warfare operations, operations which lasted long after the war’s end and which found Habe in charge of no fewer than eighteen German newspapers throughout the Allied territories.

Habe was no mere grunt, in other words. He was a strategic asset, trusted with running major psychological warfare programs. He also trained other soldiers in these techniques:

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His memoir, A Proud Hungarian, mentions a psychological warfare school in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where Scitovsky and others were being trained in propaganda. He characterizes Habe as the “US Army’s propaganda expert” in his memoir of the war years, and describes how Habe trained him in spotting important information in the New York Times, and how to use that information for propaganda purposes. They practiced making radio broadcasts, writing articles and filler, designing propaganda posters, and all of it in both French and German. According to Scitovsky, Habe also had been a student of the Bauhaus and thus had a good eye for artistic composition as well as literature and journalism.

And of course, this work had various intelligence applications, leading to Habe working with the OSS, the wartime forerunner of the CIA:

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Another friend of Habe at this time is psy-war officer Alfred de Grazia— now a professor at Princeton University and, even more intriguingly, a friend of the late Immanuel Velikovsky—who was with Habe in North Africa in 1943. His book on the war years makes for very interesting reading, as it reveals that the “Mobile Broadcasting Company” was a cover for OSS (Office of Strategic Services) activities in Europe, and that they were joint OSS-US Army units.

Levenda also finds an interesting link between this and his earlier project on the Nazis:

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Viereck was a propaganda officer and spy for the Kaiser during World War I and a colleague of infamous British occultist and sometime spy Aleister Crowley. Viereck went on to conduct espionage and propaganda activities during World War II as well, and wound up arrested for his efforts, spending about a year in prison. At the same time, his son—Peter Viereck—was working for the OSS and the 1st Mobile Broadcasting Company in North Africa, along with Hans Habe and other notables, including Martin Herz, a future US Ambassador! And we should not forget yet another OSS officer in Italy at this time, Peter Tompkins, a broadcast journalist who became an intelligence officer during the war, but whose fame rests more on his researches in two fields: Egyptian archaeology on the one hand, and the use of lie detectors in the investigation of the “secret life of plants” on the other. Also involved in intelligence during the war in Europe—and specifically in the interrogation of Nazi prisoners, like his counterparts in OSS and USSBS—was J. D. Salinger, the famed and reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, that favorite tome of American assassins. He was a CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) officer from 1943, and took part in the D-Day invasion of June 1944.13 His duties were essentially the same as those of his OSS counterparts: to round up Nazis and interrogate them, and to search for collaborators and German Army deserters among the “civilians.” It also appears that two other gentlemen who will figure in our story—Clay Shaw and Fred Crisman—were involved in similar intelligence activities, specifically with the Paperclip operations.

So, rather illustrious, and unusual, company. Especially unusual, in the case of Shaw and Crisman:

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Shaw, as many readers are aware, figured prominently in the Kennedy Assassination theories of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and others; Crisman, supposedly a friend of Shaw from the war years, was subpoenaed by Jim Garrison to testify concerning that relationship. It has been suggested that Shaw was an OSS officer during the war; Crisman certainly was, as his CIA files demonstrate. Crisman, however, was also involved in the seminal UFO contact of the twentieth century. This was the Maury Island affair of 1947, which ushered in the whole UFO spectrum, from “flying saucers,” to “men in black,” to government coverups and exploding

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As if that weren’t enough, another Army Intelligence officer in Rome at this time, charged with hunting down Nazi agents like his OSS counterparts, was Philip J. Corso, who would eventually find a position on President Eisenhower’s National Security Staff. It was Corso who, a bit before his death, published The Day After Roswell, a book claiming that he was privy to reverse-engineered scientific achievements based on captured flying saucers, and had actually seen the corpse of an extraterrestrial from Roswell in a shipping crate on its way to Wright Air Force Base in Ohio, a claim that is hotly debated on both sides of the UFO issue, even though Corso’s bona fides in all other respects seem unimpeachable.

UFOs and military intelligence/OSS. Interesting, how those seem to end up being connected so often, but that's for later discussion.

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Someone as high-profile and as rabidly anti-Nazi as Habe was a jewel in the psy-war crown. After all, they made a movie about his life in a Nazi POW camp (The Cross of Lorraine); he was married to the adopted daughter of the former US Ambassador to Russia; he was running propaganda and psy-war operations against the Nazis and then, after the war, against both the Nazi sympathizers and the Communists. If the Allied postwar intelligence community was like a corporation, then Habe had a seat on the Board.

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Was Habe involved with Operation Paperclip, the US effort to bring Nazi scientists—especially rocket scientists, but also medical men and other experts—to America after the war?

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There is an intriguing—and startling—photograph in Tom Bower’s Blind Eye to Murder, an account of the Allied failure to completely de-Nazify Germany after the war. 15It is labeled Photograph 13, “The Paperclip Scientists,” and describes “the men who put America on the moon, enjoying a Bavarian evening in Chicago, 1950.” Among the scientists—the notorious “physician” Dr. Hubertus Strughold, Wernher von Braun, and General Walter Dornberger—there is another figure, identified as “Hans Habe.” Hans Habe does not appear in the text of Bower’s book, nor in the index or anywhere else. The photo certainly looks like Habe, when compared to the De Grazia photo and the one in Current Biography of 1943. But how could that be? What would Hans Habe be doing hanging out in apparent conviviality with Paperclip scientists?

Project Paperclip, of course, was one of the blackest black ops in all of intelligence history. Unrepetant Nazis, responsible for war crimes and atrocities beyond count, rescued and hidden from the prying eyes of the Nuremberg prosecutors, then spirited away to America or other "safe locations" in South America, to form an integral part of the military-industrial complex to combat the Soviets.

UFOs and intelligence officers appear again:

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There is another famous photograph to consider, this one notorious among UFO enthusiasts and debunkers alike. It is of an “alien,” a short creature in a strange suit, a weird mask with elongated forehead and breathing apparatus, holding hands with an Army officer as another person walks behind carrying his… oxygen tank? It first appeared in a German newspaper on April Fool’s Day, 1950, and made the tabloid circuit in the States shortly thereafter, in which form the author first saw it as a child years later. This photo would have appeared in one of Habe’s newspapers (it appeared in 1950, and Habe was in charge of West German propaganda until 1951) and certainly would not have been shown without his prior involvement and approval as the US Army psychological warfare and propaganda expert. The photo was obviously a hoax and was published that way, in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous Roswell sighting of 1947, perhaps.

Habe retired in the 1950s to Switzerland.

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In the meantime, Habe began writing books critical of the United States. One of his more famous efforts, Der Tod in Texas: Eine amerikanische Tragoedie, (“Death in Texas: An American Tragedy”) was an attack on the Warren Commission published in 1964. Habe had been traveling through the United States at the time of the assassination and did not believe the conclusions of the Warren Report. He was very fond of Kennedy, but very critical of America in the wake of the assassination and what he perceived as the obvious coverup efforts by the government and the willingness of the American people to accept the government’s findings. Habe. OSS operations. Psychological warfare. UFO hoax. Paperclip scientists. Even the JFK assassination. More—or less—than meets the eye?

Levenda goes on to explain that psychological warfare is not simply propaganda:

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Simpson’s study, however, goes even further and cites clandestine operations such as sabotage and assassination as functions of the psychological warfare effort from the very beginning, for what the establishment considers “psychological warfare” the enemy often considers “terrorism”; these are two sides of the same coin. These operations are not, strictly speaking, military in nature, but have as their goal the psychological disorientation of an enemy population. The Nazis had already been working a psy-war system of their own since the 1930s when they came into power. Mystic and Theosophist Otto Ohlendorff, who would later become a famous SS Einsatzgruppe D commando, cut his milk teeth on psychological warfare programs with his own creation, the Deutsche Lebensgebiete, in 1939, before going hunting in the Caucasus, looking for Jews and Freemasons, and killing ninety thousand innocent people in the process. Probably the most famous propaganda chief of the war itself was the odd-looking, in-your-face Nazi fanatic Josef Goebbels; most Americans and other Allies could not name his opposite number in their own countries. Propaganda was something the other side did. Our side does not use propaganda, the story goes; it merely disseminates factual, i.e., truthful, information. Meanwhile, “propaganda” and “psychological warfare” became synonymous within the United States intelligence agencies, and psychological warfare was the province of agencies like the famous OSS or the Army’s G-2 and therefore operated in a cloak-and-dagger world of secrecy.

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According to Simpson, British and Nazi German strategies and tactics in this field have historically been termed “political warfare” and Weltanschauungskrieg (“worldview warfare”), respectively. Each of these conceptualizations of psychological warfare explicitly links mass communication with selective application of violence (murder, sabotage, assassinations, insurrection, counterinsurrection, etc.) as a means of achieving ideological, political, or military goals.

Does any of this sound familiar? Like the resume of certain intelligence agencies post-WWII? Levenda goes on to discuss how psychological operations require an intimate understanding of the psychology, history and culture of the people one is trying to influence, and how this leads to a disturbing conclusion:

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…And eventually, the temptation will arise to test some of these principles on the domestic population. After all, with whose mindset are we the most familiar but our own? What better place to test new theories of psychological warfare than among our native populace? And how better to control our population politically than through the judicious use of propaganda, using the robust media of the most turned-on, tuned-in, mentally-massaged nation on earth: the United States of America?

Chief among these postwar practictioners of psychological warfare is Colonel Lansdale, an infamous and notorious figure in certain circles:

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United States Air Force Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale was the CIA’s chief operative in the Philippines during the Huk rebellion in the 1950s. As such, he was under the oversight of C. D. Jackson and Nelson Rockefeller, who were responsible for psychological warfare operations at that time in the Philippines and other hot spots. It was Lansdale who came up with the idea of using the Huk belief in vampires—the asuang—against them. The psy-war squad would snatch a Huk in ambush and then kill him; they would pierce his neck with two holes, like a vampire bite, and then hang the body up and drain the blood. They would leave the body where the Huk would be sure to find it, neck punctured, drained of blood. After his successes in the Philippines, Lansdale was transferred to Vietnam. This was in 1954. At this time, Lansdale followed a psy-war technique that was used during World War Two: the use of astrologers to predict fatal outcomes for enemy leaders. Lansdale was so successful at his work that he was put in charge of organizing Operation Mongoose, the anti-Castro CIA operation designed to destabilize the Cuban regime. In one of these operations, Lansdale suggested simulating the Second Coming. He proposed telling the Cuban people that Fidel Castro was the Anti-Christ, and then staging the return of Jesus, complete with phosphorous shells fired over Havana. His partners in Operation Mongoose called the plan “elimination by illumination.” That was in 1962. By 1964, the use of occult themes and rituals became an accepted part of psychological warfare planning. The Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at the American University prepared a paper at the request of the US Army on “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic and Other Psychological Phenomena and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo.” The paper was authored by James R. Price and Paul Jureidini. American University was no stranger to psychological warfare research, having seen the establishment there of the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) in 1950. The BSSR was the scene of numerous studies of psychological warfare on Eastern European countries, and its African psy-war studies were underwritten by the Human Ecology Fund, an organization well-known to researchers of government-sponsored mind control programs as a front for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program.

Lansdale was as crazy as the operation he is most famous for, Mongoose, but it was a methodical sort of crazy, with a twisted logic to it. The CIA, as part of its focus on covert action, found the idea of using religious and occult themes to undermine foreign governments to be a very tantalising one.

But, for the moment, back to Marina Habe's murder:

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Marina was believed to be an associate of the Manson “family,” and it is alleged that Charles Manson himself stabbed her to death. Was she selected for a particular reason, or was it just an evil coincidence? There is some evidence to show that the Manson “family” murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the day after the Tate murders was a contract killing. Indeed, much of the violence perpetrated by Manson and his followers had a basis in other criminal activity. They were purposeful. Manson does not fit the profile of a serial killer, and indeed his crimes do not fit that pattern at all. A serial killer would not have missed the slaughter at the Tate household, for instance, which Manson had done, sending his followers inside to commit the hideous knife attacks on the five unfortunate victims.

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Why, then, was Marina killed? A lust killing, pure and simple? Manson getting off on savagely murdering a college coed? His schedule for the day of the kidnap of Marina Habe and her subsequent murder argues against this; he left Death Valley for one day and returned the next. That implies he went to Los Angeles with a specific purpose in mind, a task to accomplish, and returned when the deed was done.

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For Manson’s most famous victim, he chose Sharon Tate, the daughter of an Army intelligence officer serving in Vietnam. Was there a connection? Two victims, both female, both daughters of intelligence officers, both living in Los Angeles; murdered within eight months of each other.

Remember, Habe was described as a fanatical anti-Nazi. And he was sufficiently important to American intelligence to likely have knowledge of how the Nazis had morphed from strategic threat to strategic asset in the eyes of American intelligence:

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The most famous intelligence coup of the post-war period was the recruitment of General Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi spymaster whose specialty was Russia and Eastern Europe. His story is told, albeit thinly disguised, in Hans Habe’s Agent of the Devil, where he is identified as “General von Greehahn.” Habe treats his subject cynically, and it is easy to see that he has become frustrated with Allied duplicity where the de-Nazification process was concerned. The book was published in 1958, by which time Habe had retreated to the aloof neutrality of the Swiss Alps.

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Habe was in a position to watch the OSS morph into the CIA, and to observe how many of his sworn enemies became CIA operatives while he sat in Munich or Berlin, writing articles and editing newspapers for the Allies.

It's nothing conclusive, of course. But we should also recall Manson's own ideology had strong mystical fascist elements to it...as did the Process Church's, which Manson was linked to.

And anyone with even mildly strong ethical leanings would take umbrage at a man like this being protected:

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Perhaps the most intriguing locale for former Nazi scientists was Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. Unlike Fort Bliss, near El Paso, where by February 1946 more than 100 Nazi scientists were in residence, working on the rocket program, Randolph AFB near San Antonio was used for more arcane research. It was at Randolph that we come across the name of Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Strughold managed to escape the fate of his Nazi colleagues by clever maneuvering and outright lying about his work and his responsibility—aided and abetted by American intelligence agencies—but in the end as more and more files were found and declassified, it became apparent that Dr. Strughold was right in the middle of some of the more heinous medical experimentation this planet has ever known.

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As director of an aviation medicine research institute for the Luftwaffe, holding the rank of Colonel, Strughold was in a position to know of the horrific medical experiments being carried out on living human beings at Dachau in the name of aviation medicine, some of which were being conducted by his friends and co-workers. Prior to the war years, aviation doctors had risked their own lives in these experiments. Now, with such a wealth of potential guinea pigs at their disposal, there was no need to endanger the lives of scientists. Experiments in high altitude pressure, extremes of heat and cold, etc. were carried out on living Jewish and political prisoners at Dachau, and these results shared among the members of the Nazi aviation medicine community.

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The experiments involved plunging prisoners into ice-cold water, with thermometers stuck in their various orifices, to measure how long it took for a live human being to freeze to death. Prisoners were also subjected to oxygen deprivation, to high pressure experiments, etc., and much of this was captured on still and motion pictures, some of which have survived to this day. It is not known how many prisoners in total died as a result of these “experiments,” but eyewitness testimony indicates that eighty prisoners alone died as a result of the high pressure tests conducted by Rascher.

And given the Nazi prediliction for medical experiments, and the subsequent activities of the CIA, the question has to be asked: did the Nazis undertake research in any way similiar to MK-ULTRA?

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The first indication we have that anything like a mind control program existed within the Third Reich is the memoir of Himmler’s astrologer, Wulff, who talks about the Nazi desire to create a program within the Reich to duplicate the mental state of the Japanese soldier, a human being willing and eager to risk his life without question for his country, stuffing his own body into pillboxes to blow them up, and the Chinese Communist “human wave” trooper, who would rush unthinkingly into certain slaughter. This “Asian” mentality was something the Nazis would have dearly loved to inculcate into their own troops, and Wulff—seen as an expert on Asian mysticism—was hired to come up with ways that could be used to condition the German soldier the same way. Buried in the voluminous files of the Ahnenerbe-SS are also references to the use of mescaline and cannabis as “truth serums,” programs that—according to John Marks in his ground-breaking study of CIA mind control projects—have been kept classified by US intelligence since 1945. Here and there we come across the names of Paperclip scientists involved with military and CIA mind control programs, such as Friedrich Hoffmann, a Nazi chemist who advised the CIA on matters relating to psychotropic substances for use in interrogation and “brainwashing.” Hoffmann has been linked to Edgewood Arsenal, where CIA maintained TSS (Technical Service Staff) personnel involved in various aspects of chemical and biological warfare, including—according to John Marks—the implantation of new memories in amnesiac patients. One finds an article by Hoffmann, and co-authors William A. Mosher and Richard Hively, on the subject of “Isolation of Trans-*6-Tetrahydrocannibinol from Marijuana” in the April 20, 1966 issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society, an issue published—ironically enough—on Hitler’s birthday. Hoffmann was working at the time under the cover of the University of Delaware, along with his co-author Mosher. Another colleague at the University was Dr. James Moore, a chemist originally with Parke, Davis in Detroit, and a person well-known among aficionados as deeply implicated in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, who experimented on mind-altering substances such as mescaline, psilocybin and the highly controversial drug BZ (quinuclidinyl benzilate).

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At the same time, in the United States, OSS agents were using the same or similar drugs on unsuspecting targets—such as Mafia “made men”—to see if the same objectives could be attained. Gradually, in the US, hypnosis was also used, sometimes in combination with drugs. And if false information, or “suggestions,” could be implanted in the subject, then we have an instance where the goals of psychological warfare and regular intelligence work overlap.

And if we're discussing rocket programs and the occult, then the subject must, inevitably, move towards that of Jack Parsons:

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Naturally, the Nazis were not the only ones with a rocket program during World War II. The United States was involved in various research projects involving rocketry, including a search for the perfect solid-fuel propellant. At this time, much of the work was being done in California, at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) under the famous team of Theodore von Karman and Frank J. Malina at Pasadena. One of their more illustrious—if eventually notorious— team members was Jack Parsons, a tall, darkly handsome and frighteningly intelligent man who would eventually lose his security clearance after the War due to his relationship with occultists and magicians. It was Parsons, a devotee of English magician Aleister Crowley, who would later declare himself the Antichrist… after a stormy relationship with the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons was accused of giving secret technology to the Israelis, among other felonies, and at one time worked for the Howard Hughes empire. He died quite prematurely from an explosion at his home, either an accident, or suicide, or murder; none of the sources seem to agree.

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On June 13, 1941, an Army officer is initiated into the OTO at the Agape Lodge temple. His name is Grady McMurtry, and he will be stationed for a time in England where he meets Aleister Crowley and develops an odd sort of relationship with the Prophet of Thelema. At this same time, Crowley has been involved in some potential intelligence work with such figures as Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming, both officers with British intelligence and friends of Crowley. They would later become famous novelists, of course, but at the time they were seeking Crowley’s assistance to exploit his knowledge of the European occult underground in the war effort. (This is all covered in detail in my Unholy Alliance.) McMurtry will return to the United States safely after the war, and engineer a coup to take over leadership of the OTO after the deaths of Crowley and Crowley’s designated successor. More about McMurtry in later chapters, but his movements between the Agape Lodge—which is, after all, infamous among the rocket scientists who are working on highly classified work—and London, where Crowley, their leader, is staying are suggestive of a larger purpose.

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According to FBI file 65-1753, originating with the Los Angeles Field Office but made at Cincinnati, Ohio on November 22, 1950, Parsons was being investigated by the Army’s CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) in May 1948. A Major Sam Bruno, Chief of Security at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, reported the CIC investigation to the FBI. His report stated that “a religious cult, believed to advocate sexual perversion, was organized at subject’s home at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California, which had been reported subversive…. The report further reflects that subject reportedly associated with one [name deleted] an alleged Communist Party member.”

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A word to the nervous: Wright-Patterson AFB in 1948 is a very suggestive place to have been involved in an investigation of Jack Parsons, to be sure. UFO enthusiasts know Wright-Patterson as the scene where the elements of the crashed Roswell “flying saucer” were taken in 1947. It is also, of course, where Nazi General Walter Dornberger and his merry men were first taken as part of Operation Paperclip, curiously at the very same time as the Roswell crash in July 1947, leading many to suggest that the UFOs were really Nazi experimental aircraft. The author believes that the security personnel at the air base would have been involved in the Parsons investigation due to the occultist’s deep involvement in the rocket program, and not due to anything more sinister; however, interested readers are advised to keep an open mind, because the people who eventually become involved in the Parsons investigation turn up in some odd (and worrisome) places.

Like the Kennedy assassination.

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On February 7, 1952 Hoover sent James McInerney a memo regarding Parsons, informing him that Parsons’ appeal to the Industrial Employment Review Board of the Department of Defense was turned down. According to an attached letter from the Board, Parsons “might voluntarily or involuntarily act against the security interests of the United States and constitute a danger to the national security.” 68 Five months later he was dead. James McInerney is an interesting person to associate with Parsons. We discover, for instance, in Robert Maheu’s autobiography Next to Hughes, that it was James McInerney who provided the initial funding for Maheu’s security firm, Robert A. Maheu Associates. According to Maheu, “Almost immediately, I began working for the CIA.” This was in 1954, and McInerney was still Assistant AG. He and Maheu, and some other ex-FBI agents, were gambling illegally, and Maheu won handily the princely sum (in 1954) of $2,800, all from McInerney. When Maheu attempted to refuse the winnings, McInerney would have none of it. It was to this fund that Maheu attributes the initial financial investment for his agency. Maheu, of course, would go on to greater glory, including his infamous relationship with Howard Hughes (Parsons’ former employer) and his involvement with the CIA/Mafia plots against Castro. McInerney himself would go on to represent the Kennedys at one point, according to Victor Lasky, even though Maheu was told to sever his relationship with the Kennedy family or else he could not become involved with the CIA.

And for those wondering if the Communist reference above was merely McCarthyite paranoia, or there was something to it...well...

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one of Parsons’ earliest partners at GALCIT was Dr. Tsien Hsue Shen, a scientist who specialized in long-range missile development; in fact, his first prototype was built under Parsons’ watchful eye at Aerojet. During the McCarthy Era, however, Dr. Tsien was accused of being a Communist. Although he denied any such affiliation, his security clearance was also removed; he protested this straight up to the Undersecretary of the Navy, saying he would go back to China if he wasn’t reinstated. Instead, the Undersecretary made a call to Immigration and had Dr. Tsien arrested! Tsien eventually left the United States, disgusted at his treatment and the suspicion that was aroused by a man born in pre-Communist China. He returned to China as threatened… and jump-started the Chinese missile program. Were the McCarthy investigators wrong in their assumption that Tsien was a Communist? A review of the FBI files shows that Parsons was suspected of knowing someone believed to be a Communist, and he was interrogated on this point several times by the FBI over the course of several years. Further recourse to some hand-written notes in those same files shows an intriguing reference to a suspect in the US Consulate, Shanghai and a list of friends of this suspect; all of the names in the Parsons file are deleted, except for Parsons himself. Was Tsien a Communist, working for Mao’s China? And if so, was Parsons aware of this at the time? With his avowed hatred of Christianity—he called himself the Antichrist, after all—and the suspicions of the American government that he was a walking security risk, is it possible that Parsons was only one element of a larger network of political intrigue, involving Chinese Communists, occultists, and rocket scientists? Was the much-rumored job in Israel a cover for something more ominous? And was his murder the final solution to the nagging problem of what to do with a brilliant young scientist who would not bow to “all authority that is not based on courage and manhood”?

1947 was a really, really weird year, for anyone paying attention:

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1947 is also in the running as the pivotal year of the postwar period. Many of the issues that define our generation owe their conception to the events of that year. 1947 was the year the CIA was created, and the penetrating of secrets; it was the year of the famous UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and the subsequent concealing of secrets; the year the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and their exposure of secrets. It was the year Winston Churchill made his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, thus declaring the beginning of the Cold War. It’s the year that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) begins its full-scale investigation of Hollywood. It is the year that inventor Arthur Young leaves Bell Helicopter for a full-time study of paranormal phenomena. It is the year that the US Navy begins Project CHATTER, the search for a viable truth serum, a magic potion to unlock the secrets of the mind. In May of that year, the Corporal is launched: America’s answer to the V-2 rocket, compliments of Jack Parsons and the rest of the JPL rocketeers. It is also the year of the famous “Black Dahlia” murder in Los Angeles, and of Admiral Byrd’s “Hollow Earth” expedition. It is the year that Aleister Crowley dies. It is the year that Holly Maddux is born: a future murder victim whose death will expose the seamy underworld of the New Age movement.

And so, at long last, the topic comes around to the UFO mystery of 1947, the spate of sightings that took place in that year, and the unacknowledged involvement of at least one American intelligence official:

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In June 21, 1947—the summer solstice—six unidentified flying objects were seen over Maury Island in Puget Sound in the State of Washington. The observers were Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman who was avoiding bad weather by anchoring in Maury Island Bay, his two crewmen, his teenaged son and a dog. The objects were doughnut-shaped and were hovering at about two thousand feet over the boat, according to Dahl. One of the six seemed to be in trouble, as it was losing altitude and was being circled by the other five. The objects seemed to be metallic, with a hole in the center (hence the idea they were “doughnut-shaped”) and with portholes around the outer circumference. Each of the objects seemed to be about one hundred feet in diameter. There was a small explosion, and one of the objects rained hot metal all over the boat, killing the dog, damaging the boat and injuring the teenaged son. Dahl quickly beached his craft and began taking pictures of the objects, which soon took off and headed towards Canada. Dahl tried to radio for help or to make a report, but his radio was jammed. Instead, bewildered, he headed back to Tacoma. He got some treatment for his son’s injured arm, and then took his evidence—the camera, the film and some samples of the metallic slag—to his boss, a man known as Fred Lee Crisman.

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No matter on what side of the Kennedy assassination one finds oneself—a believer in the Warren Report, or a believer in a conspiracy—the Fred Crisman element strains credulity. More than twenty years after this event, Crisman will be subpoenaed by District Attorney Jim Garrison as a suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Crisman, a former OSS officer, a man with a CIA file, a man friendly with Clay Shaw… in at the birth of the twentieth century’s UFO experience? Of course, this is not the full story. Who would believe the full story?

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Regardless, the next day—on June 23, 1947—Crisman went out to Maury Island and found what appeared to be molten glass or metal and foil, but not before another UFO passed overhead. Crisman returned to Tacoma, not knowing what to do at the moment with the information and evidence he had acquired, or so it seemed. So far, the UFO sighting was a localized event, a small town anomaly. The next day, June 24, 1947, the world changed. This was the day of the famous sighting of nine UFOs north of Mount Rainier by Kenneth Arnold.

Crisman had an interesting relationship with Raymond Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, who went on to publicize Kenneth Arnold's encounter:

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His relationship to Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, is full of unanswered questions. Why this former OSS officer and harbor patrolman would be involved with a man who published fantasy tales of underground civilizations, weird military experiments (such as the Philadelphia Experiment, in which it was claimed the military had developed a device that could dematerialize a ship and then re-materialize it somewhere else on earth, a story that was later believed to be true by an astonishing number of persons), and mischievous aliens from other worlds, is not clear. Like fellow OSS officer Peter Tompkins after him, Crisman may simply have been fascinated by the paranormal and by speculative history. Or his interest may reveal a slightly more sinister agenda. Speculation is rampant that Crisman’s role was that of a disinformation specialist, and that his ultimate purpose was to devalue the UFO reports or, failing that, to erase all traces of the evidence. Crisman contacted Palmer in writing concerning the Maury Island incident; Palmer himself had contacted Arnold about the Mount Rainier sighting, offering a two hundred dollar advance for his story. These were only two of a large number of UFO sightings that were taking place that month and into July.

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Dahl finally breaks, and tells Arnold the same story he told Crisman. Dahl’s photographs are gone, of course: he has given his camera and his film to Crisman. He did, however, manage to keep back a few pieces of the “slag” that fell from the damaged UFO. He showed Arnold a piece of what seemed to be volcanic rock, not a very suspicious-looking fragment. Dahl also told Arnold about a letter he had received, which stated the UFOs were piloted by aliens who had become visible due to US atomic explosions, and that they were visiting the earth to help protect it from unspecified enemies. The letter writer was anonymous, and one can’t help wondering if Crisman was behind this, as well. At this point, Arnold felt he was being had. The whole story sounded very suspicious, very artificial. He asked a friend, another pilot—United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith—for his take on the affair. They came to the conclusion that either the story was a simple hoax, or it was part of an intelligence operation. They distrusted Crisman completely, and felt that he was trying to control the investigation. Either Crisman was a hoaxer, or a spy. Either way, Arnold and Smith felt that he had nothing to contribute.

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Then, as if in confirmation of their suspicions, it was reported that United Press International had received verbatim transcripts of their interviews and discussions, the ones held at Arnold’s mysteriously-booked hotel room! Suddenly, it was all becoming clear. Arnold’s presence in Tacoma had been part of a larger plot; his room was selected in advance and bugged; the information he extracted from Dahl, and his conversations with Smith, were sent to the news agency (for what purpose can only be imagined). It seemed as if there was an operation underway to discredit the Maury Island UFO report and to do that with Kenneth Arnold, a much more credible witness than either Dahl or Crisman. Two birds with one stone?

Crisman was also present at a meeting between Kenneth Arnold and military intelligence, where this odd sequence of events occured:

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At the airport, an odd thing happened, one which has plagued UFO researchers for years. Crisman, the man the intelligence officers seemed to think was nothing more than an oddball hoaxer, turned up at the last minute and gave the men a heavy box which he claimed was filled with the debris from the damaged UFO. To Arnold, who was there, the contents looked like a bunch of rocks. The men stowed the box in the trunk of their car and left for the airport, catching their flight. They never made it back to base. Both Davidson and Brown were killed. The enlisted men on board parachuted to safety after the left engine caught fire—according to the report of one of the survivors—and the two officers remained with the aircraft for a full ten minutes before the B-52 bomber crashed to earth. No one has any idea why the two intelligence officers would have remained with the plane and not parachuted themselves; or why they did not radio a distress call. The emergency fire-fighting equipment was inoperable, so there was no chance to save the plane. According to Major George Sander of the US Army Air Corps, the plane was carrying classified material. Was that a reference to the box of rocks carried on board by Davidson and Brown?

And another Kennedy reference makes its way in:

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One of the men involved in the investigation of UFO reports in the American Northwest that year was none other than FBI Special Agent Guy Banister. Guy Banister’s name is well-known among conspiracy aficionados as another one of the men implicated by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the Kennedy assassination. It was Guy Banister—by this time a former FBI agent—who rented office space at the same location stamped on Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” flyers. Banister was running an anti-Castro Cuban operation from his investigator’s office, an operation that attracted the likes of former Eastern Airlines pilot and assassination suspect David Ferrie. Oswald was running a pro-Castro Cuban operation from the same address, an anomaly that could only be explained if one understood that Banister and Oswald were working together, and that the pro-Castro operation was a front for some other, even more nefarious, purpose. Further, while Banister was FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Chicago field office during World War II, one of his FBI subordinates was James McCord of Watergate “plumbers” fame, 3and another was Robert A. Maheu: the man who would later become head of his own investigative agency and an employee of Howard Hughes, the man whose agency was started by money won from James Mc-Inerney, the assistant Attorney General who was involved in the Jack Parsons investigation. Maheu would go on to become the man in the middle between the CIA and organized crime in the assassination plots against Castro.

X Files!

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A look at recently declassified FBI files for that period in 1947 show a number of telexes from Banister, some with his initials “WGB,” all pertaining to UFO phenomena, as well as other FBI documents with the designation “Security Matter—X” or simply “SM-X,” the origin—the author supposes—of the “X Files,” which, at least in 1947, did exist at the FBI and was concerned with UFOs (as well as with the federal investigation of Wilhelm Reich, the pioneer psychoanalyst whose “orgone therapy” had run afoul of the medical establishment and who himself was a firm believer in the existence of UFOs).

And there are Nazis too. Of course.

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While the Army then changed its story to describe the Roswell debris as that of a weather balloon, events were proceeding apace. General Walter Dornberger, the chief of the Nazi space program at Peenemuende and, later, at the Mittelwerke at Nordhausen, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of concentration camp inmates as slave laborers, is sent to Wright AFB as the Roswell debris is being shipped there. Dornberger and Wernher von Braun—both of whom initial CIC reports describe as ardent Nazis—have been forgiven their past sins by the Army and are brought to the United States under Operation Overcast—renamed Paperclip—much to the irritation of Nuremberg prosecutors. They are now in a position to review the Roswell wreckage.

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Thus, the 1947 UFO sightings attracted two men—Crisman and Banister—who both would come under suspicion twenty years later for their supporting roles in the Kennedy assassination.

And this is hardly the start of the weird coincidences, or the apparent intersectionality between different kinds of high weirdness.

Once again, most people who claim to have seen UFOs are dismissed as scientifically unsophisticated or somehow misinformed. In the case of Roswell, however, the sheer number of military witnesses alone argues against this. These witnesses include Corporal E.L. Pyles, Sergeant Thomas C. Gonzales, Sergeant Melvin E. Brown, CIC agent Master Sergeant Bill Rickett, Major Edwin Easley, Lieutenant Colonel Albert L. Duran, Colonel William Blanchard, and up to Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, not forgetting Major Marcel himself, among others. In some cases, these men saw the crash and concluded that the craft was not of this world; in other cases, they saw bodies that did not seem to be human; in still other cases, they examined the crash debris and were amazed by the strange properties of the metal, such that it resisted extreme heat and could not be dented by hammers. This list includes both officers and enlisted men, from a Corporal to a Brigadier General. Either they are all lying, or some of them are lying, or they are all telling the truth. It strains credulity to believe that they were all simply mistaken, or the victims themselves of some kind of hoax.

And we get some more info on the aforementioned Philip Corso:

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Corso’s credentials are impeccable; he had given testimony before Congress on the fate of POWs being held in North Korea, he had appeared on Prime Time Live as an expert on U-2 overflights, had worked for both Senator Strom Thurmond and Senator James Eastland as “a staff member specializing in national security,” and had a remarkable twenty-one year career in the armed services. He had been part of Operation Paperclip in Italy. He had been a staff member for Senator Richard Russell on the Warren Commission (yet another Paperclip/UFO/assassination tie). The eighty-year-old retired military man with no need for the money the book would bring (and, indeed, due to some legal problems his royalties would be held up until after he died), and with a mantelpiece filled with medals and awards and photos with the famous and powerful in Washington, had no discernible reason—no ulterior motive that we can find—for participating in a hoax, if that is what Roswell is. His claim that his job at the Pentagon involved coordinating the reverse engineering of alien technology was greeted by either sneers of derision or cries of “I told you so!” The question that has not been answered is why Corso, at the end of his long and successful career, would have bothered writing all of this if it wasn’t true, and thereby besmirch a previously blameless reputation.

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Unfortunately, the Roswell Air Base files on the crash were all destroyed, as US Representative Steven Schiff (R.-New Mexico) discovered to his disbelief in 1995.

Another Kennedy-UFO link is also made:

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February 12, 1948. Brigadier General Charles P. Cabell of the US Air Force Directorate of Intelligence—and later to become Deputy Director of the CIA, implicated in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and possibly in the Kennedy assassination—issued a memo requesting all Air Force bases in the United States be provided with at least one camera-equipped fighter plane to record data from UFOs. The request was considered too expensive, and was turned down.

But now the book turns to the creation of MK-ULTRA, and it's many attendant programs.

code names like BLUEBIRD and the later ARTICHOKE “have no known significance.” This is echoed in John Marks’ classic study of CIA mind control projects, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979). Yet it is true that, in the early days of the CIA, project names were at the whim of their creators, and not the results of a computer-generated random search among a classified dictionary as they are now. Thus, project names usually had some meaning attached to them. (For instance, when Allen Dulles was put in charge of the CIA’s mind control project he changed the name BLUEBIRD to ARTICHOKE, since (according to Gordon Thomas) he was fond of the vegetable. It was, according to John Marks, CIA security chief Sheffield Edwards who decided to call the project—a program for exploring the uses of hypnosis and other means to protect Agency personnel from enemy psychic penetration—BLUEBIRD. Why, then, did he choose the name BLUEBIRD for the first-ever CIA mind control project, the forerunner of the more infamous MK-ULTRA? At the time, the US Navy had its own truth serum operation, called Project CHATTER, begun in 1947. CHATTER seems a more appropriate project name, since its goal was to make prisoners talk. Thus, we are still faced with what appears to be a minor mystery: why BLUEBIRD? There is a phrase which is perhaps not used so much these days as it was in the tender years of the twentieth century: “the blue bird of happiness.” What many people do not realize—and did not realize even then—was that this term had its origins in a play and a novel by the Belgian Nobel Prize-winning author and dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). Maeterlinck was surrounded by the Symbolist movement (forerunners of the Surrealists) in fin-de-siécle France, and was a friend of Sar Peladan, a noted Rosicrucian of the day. Indeed, Maeterlinck was something of a mystic himself and a firm believer in occult phenomena, as his other writings such as The Other World (1942) amply demonstrate. He was also a keen observer of nature and natural phenomena, in The Life of the Bee (1901), in which the concept of the “meme” is introduced to a wider audience (after its creation by a relatively-unknown German psychologist—Richard Sauder—years before, the same psychologist who created the “engram,” made famous by L. Ron Hubbard).

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His writings were very popular in Europe, being a mixture of the profound with the childlike, such as his most famous work The Blue Bird (1909). In this play, first performed in the Russian language in Moscow on September 30, 1908 and later in English in London and New York, two children set off on a search for the Blue Bird of Happiness. This search leads them on many adventures—a kind of initiatic quest for the Grail—and the author was startled to realize that many of the motifs of Maeterlinck’s play are repeated in the CIA’s search for a Manchurian Candidate, a search that began with Project BLUEBIRD.

And this leads onto the tragic fate of Dr. Olson:

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What is not well-known, and what has only come to light recently, is that Dr. Olson was working on chemical and biological warfare weapons at his laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, work that involved the search for drugs that would unlock the human memory bank and help to create the perfect assassin, the “Manchurian Candidate”; that he doubted the morality of his work when confronted with some “test subjects” at a secret base in the United Kingdom (according to Gordon Thomas, German prisoners of war); that he was a colleague of such esteemed psychological warfare experts as William Sargant, who was worried that Olson would blow the whistle on the programs.

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In 1948, Dr. Baldwin issues “Special CBW Operations” for the War Department, in which he advises a new approach for chemical and biological weapons strategy, the use of CBW weapons as sabotage.

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Between 1949 and 1969, citizens of the United States were the unwitting subjects in 239 separate cases of open-air biological attack simulations; most used chemicals that were inert and harmless, but in some cases live bacteria were used, such as in San Francisco in September 1950

Olson struggled with the ethical issues of the programs he worked on, and so was eventually referred to a psychiatrist for treatment.

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The psychiatric treatment planned for Olson is unusual, to say the least. In the first place, the “therapist” was Dr. Abramson, a Mount Sinai-connected CIA doctor whose specialty was immunology, and who had no training or credentials at all in psychotherapy, psychology or psychiatry. It seems his only qualification was that he was CIA, with a background in LSD research. Why Olson had to be taken to New York for “therapy” is also unrevealed. There had to be CIA-approved psychiatrists closer to home, in Washington or Baltimore; but Abramson had been one of those involved with the CIA’s Technical Services Staff and thus could be expected to know what was at stake and to stonewall the local authorities; also, according to the CIA’s internal memo on the events, he was the only one who had experience with LSD experimentation.

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Gottlieb and Olson also visited London and Porton Down, which is Britain’s version of Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal. Later on, Olson went to England several times himself, and met with Sargant on many occasions. In the summer of 1953—the period discussed above—Olson told Sargant he was in Europe to meet with Gottlieb and a “CIA team.” Thomas at this point tantalizes us with the statement, “Sargant was satisfied that the CIA team was doing similar work that MI6 were conducting in Europe—executing without trial known Nazis, especially SS men.” (If so, this makes for an interesting additional chapter to the history of that war, but there is no independent corroboration of this assertion.) Whatever the facts of the case, when Olson returned from his trip to Europe (which included Norway and West Berlin, according to a photocopy of his passport) he had changed. According to Sargant (via Thomas), Olson had seen the results of his work firsthand, on actual human “subjects” who were being killed by the very weapons Olson himself was developing at Detrick. The horror and ensuing guilt led Olson to question his faith in the United States government and his faith in himself as a human being.

And back to Manson, again

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Charles, Lynette Fromme and Mary Brunner were living in the woods of Mendocino County when Charlie, hitchhiking one day, was picked up by a Congregationalist minister named Dean Moorehouse. The Reverend Moorehouse is a strange twist to this already strangely twisted tale, because Moorehouse came to California from Minot, North Dakota. As we will see later, Minot—a small town of about thirty thousand people and an Air Force base—was the scene of serious and sometimes violent occult activity that was linked to the Son of Sam murder cases in New York a decade later.

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At this time it is not known whether there is any more substance to the Moorehouse/Minot link than that. However investigative journalist Maury Terry would later find elements of a drug and prostitution network shaded with a veneer of ritual Satanism based in Minot, and would connect it to a convicted murderer known as “Manson II,” to the Son of Sam killings in New York, and to the murder of producer Roy Radin in California.

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Motive was the most ephemeral aspect of the prosecution’s case against Manson; once they had the satanic and racist elements, the prosecutors looked no further. They believed that the victims in the Tate and LaBianca killings were selected randomly, as part of “Helter Skelter”: an attempt to force a race war between whites and blacks. Although this dubious motive satisfied the media’s lust for sensationalism and served to paint Charlie and his Dark Angels as the latest incarnation of Satan and Hitler combined, a look at Charlie’s criminal history would tell a different story. As prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi himself admits in his book on the case, Helter Skelter, he was surprised by the lack of violent crime in Manson’s rap sheet. Manson came across more as a con man and petty thief than as a lust killer.

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Whatever Charles Manson may be—and he may be many things—a serial killer he is not, if we look objectively at the available evidence. The murders he did commit himself were not motiveless crimes, but were each for a specific purpose.

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People with only a passing knowledge of the Manson case usually don’t realize that the Beach Boys recorded one of Manson’s songs and released it as the “B” side of their cover of the old Ersel Hickey 1958 hit “Bluebirds Over The Mountain,” a song about lost love. Manson’s song was originally entitled “Cease to Exist”—a Scientology reference and not necessarily a homicidal one—but the Boys retitled it “Never Learn Not To Love,” which comes from the song’s lyrics, and changed the line “Cease to Exist” to the more seductive “Cease to Resist.” This song later made it onto the group’s album 20/20 (1969), but by this time the reference to Charles Manson was deleted. What drew the author’s attention to this nugget of information was the song on the “A” side of Manson’s single. The title “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” was suggestive of the CIA mind control operation—even though it had been written by a rockabilly composer from Brighton, New York one night in the mid-1950s—and seemed too synchronistic to ignore.

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One of the more unusual Family members, though, if only for a short time, was Deirdre (or “DiDi”) Lansbury, the troubled teenaged daughter of actress Angela Lansbury. Angela Lansbury even went so far as to give DiDi a note that said it was all right for her to stay with the Manson Family, in case she got hassled by the police! The author felt the reverberations of this odd piece of trivia, since Angela Lansbury played the role of the evil mind controller in the 1962 John Frankenheimer film The Manchurian Candidate, a film starring Frank Sinatra, Lansbury, Laurence Harvey and Khigh Deigh that was pulled from distribution after the assassination of President Kennedy (even though Kennedy himself had given the green light to Frankenheimer to proceed with making the film, since Kennedy at the time was in delicate negotiations with the Soviets).

And The Manchurian Candidate will turn up later on in this story.

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Was it possible that Hollywood was being used as a tool of secret, special interests, and that the selection of themes, scripts, actors, studios, producers, directors was—at times, and during certain periods of international or domestic tensions—politically motivated or the result of an intelligence agenda: psychological warfare? Of course, we have the ultimate example of Ronald Reagan, the actor who became a President, but is there more to this story than that? Something more profound, and evidence of another “player” altogether?

Another striking reference to “Bluebirds” was in direct connection to the Kennedy assassination itself, the spoor of a minor event that may have had deeper implications, because it involved Lee Harvey Oswald and his time spent at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, one of only two locations outside the United States (along with Manila, in the Philippines) where the CIA maintained a store of LSD, and the base for U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union. And what was the scene of a fistfight between Oswald and Tech Sgt. Miguel Rodriguez on June 20, 1958, the same year “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” was first released? The Bluebird Café in Yamato, Japan.

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This incident merits further attention is for two reasons. In the first place, episodes of Oswald getting physical and looking for fights are few and far between. (About the only other event in which Oswald is known to have used his fists is in slapping his Russian wife, Marina, around.) Oswald was known to have been physically cowardly, and even effeminate in the way delicate young men can appear to the “jocks.”

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In any event, Lee Oswald’s deliberate attempt to provoke Rodriguez to a fistfight is wholly out of character.

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In the second place, according to some witnesses, Oswald’s actual time spent in the brig seems to have been slight, and moreover spent in civilian clothes according to the only eyewitness who actually saw him there. Some researchers feel that Oswald was receiving intelligence training at this time, and that the fight and ensuing sentence in the brig was a cover, to allow him time to complete this training unnoticed.

Now why would Oswald be chosen for intelligence training? Well...

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Oswald is known to have been approached earlier by what was probably a Communist spy in Japan—a beautiful Japanese woman who asked a lot of questions about his job at Atsugi—and he reported this contact to his superiors.

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Former CIA finance officer James Wilcott testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Oswald was, indeed, a CIA asset in Japan, according to conversations he had with his co-workers at the Agency after the assassination.

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It is impossible to tell with any certainty at this time what Oswald was really doing in the Marines at Atsugi; his military records do show some discrepancies and, in one case, a medical notation shows that he contracted gonorrhea “in the line of duty”; certainly a bizarre set of circumstances for a lowly Marine radar operator.

But of course, Oswald was a crazy lone gunman. What could that possibly have to do with the CIA?

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As discussed by Harvey M. Weinstein, himself a physician and the son of one of Cameron’s patients, Cameron had been fascinated by memory, believing memory to be stored in the brain and accessible through chemicals or other biological means. Cameron realized that the Land of Memory guarded access to the mysteries of the mind itself, and if a way could be found to call up any memory—and reinterpret those memories or eradicate them completely—then one effectively erased mental illness. He called his technique of causing selective memory loss “differential amnesia”; it was a critical aspect of what MK-ULTRA was all about. As mentioned before, if the CIA could cause certain specific memories to be erased in a targeted individual—and perhaps replaced by false memories—then they could create the perfect spy, the perfect double agent, or even the perfect assassin: a person who would commit murder and not know (not remember) why he had done so, or who had ordered the hit. Imagine an assassin, standing up in a crowd, pulling out a gun—regardless of danger to his own safety, his own life—and killing an important political figure. He is captured, of course, and then cannot say why he did what he did, cannot even remember that he did it. Such an assassin is a cypher: a crazed, lone gunman.

Oh.

The Cameron referenced above is Dr Ewen Cameron, perhaps the practitioner of one of the most infamous MK-ULTRA linked programs:

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Cameron believed that schizophrenia and other psychotic states were caused by physical conditions in the brain; like his friend and colleague of many years, Dr. William Sargant, he had a mechanistic view of consciousness and felt that with the right drug and the right procedure all could be made right as rain. This was an approach very attractive to the Technical Services Staff at the CIA; it was what they were looking for: a switch to turn memories on and off, something reliable, something quick. The CIA wanted to hear that there were easy techniques—whether drugs, or hypnosis, or some other mechanisms—to give agents in the field additional weapons in their arsenal. Cameron obliged. To that end, and to both test and prove his theories, he developed procedures known as “psychic driving” and “depatterning.” The procedures were radical and extreme, designed to totally disorient a human being, to strip away layers of consciousness and memory until one came to bedrock, and then to rebuild the personality step by step. Unfortunately, his patients—some of whom had come to him for mild disorders, such as anxiety—had no foreknowledge of the treatments and had not volunteered for the experimentation. Like other CIA guinea pigs under the MK-ULTRA program, they were unwitting and expendable test subjects.

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In the case of Cameron’s psychic driving technique, a patient would be kept isolated in a room—the “sleep room”—and would be administered some combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (what is popularly known as “electroshock”). Sometimes the shocks given were staggeringly high, and repeated more often than is usual in a therapeutic setting. The normal voltage is usually 110 volts; Cameron used 150 volts. The normal dosage was a single shock lasting a fraction of a second; Cameron’s shocks lasted longer, up to one second (and thus an average of 30 times more powerful than normal) and were done 2-3 times a day as opposed to the more usual once a day, or once every two days. Electroshock causes a major convulsion, which is then followed by several minor convulsions. Cameron’s was a variation of the already intense Page-Russell method, but taken up quite a few notches to the point where his patients became disoriented and confused. This was Cameron’s aim, which was the opposite of what was intended by the already controversial electroconvulsive therapy method. The drug regimen was equally severe: a “sleep cocktail” was administered to the subjects—one can hardly call them “patients” anymore—consisting of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan. The subject would be awakened several times a day for the electroshock treatment and for the drug concoction. The combination kept the subject asleep day and night except for the electroshock, during which time his screams could be heard all over Ward 2. This treatment typically would last from two weeks to a month, with some subjects being “treated” in this manner for over two months. In some cases, they would lose control of their bowels, be unable to feed themselves or to tend to normal bodily functions. Many tried to escape, but were always captured and brought back to their ward by the doctors and orderlies, since they were in such feeble condition that escape was impossible, groping along the walls and pathetically urinating on the floor of the corridor. The effect of this treatment was to cause the subjects to lose their memory, usually in three stages. In the first stage, much memory was lost, but not the facts of the subject being at the clinic, knowing he is at the clinic and why, and who the doctors and nurses are. The second stage involved the loss of what Cameron called “space-time image”; the subject would not know where he was or why he was there. Understandably, this disorientation was extremely frightening. Imagine waking up in a hospital bed and not knowing what had happened, or why, and with no one in a position to tell you since keeping you in that degree of confusion was necessary to the “treatment.” This nightmarish and Kafkaesque state of affairs was designed, remember, by a man who had once tested Rudolf Hess for sanity. The third and final stage of memory loss is complete amnesia. There is only knowledge and memory of the present; there is no reference to past events or feelings. Cameron proudly pointed to this stage as the one where any schizophrenia has disappeared (along, of course, with a lot more!). The mind of the subject is a blank slate. He has been depatterned. The CIA, satisfied with this level of progress, then asked Cameron to go to the next level: to implant new behavioral patterns in place of the old, erased ones. To do this, Cameron turned to another technique he had developed, which he called “psychic driving.” This method is, if anything, even more hellish than depatterning, and involves blasting the subject with tape recordings of verbal messages—usually specific for each subject—that played in a loop for sixteen hours a day for weeks. Normally, two tapes were used: the first was a “negative conditioning” tape which concentrated on, obviously, the negative facts of the subject’s life, continually reinforcing these unhealthy images. This would then be replaced by a “positive conditioning” tape, also in a loop, also for sixteen hours a day for weeks, which would emphasize the desired behavior instead of the unwanted behavior of the first tape. Cameron’s assistant in these endeavors—one Leonard Rubinstein, whose salary was paid for entirely by CIA funds—designed an enormous tape device that could play eight different tapes at the same time, thus “psychically driving” eight subjects at once. The speakers for these tapes were placed beneath the subjects’ pillows. They were inescapable, unremitting, endless; and, in some cases, augmented with the use of hallucinogens such as LSD.

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In case the reader is wondering if Dr. Ewen Cameron was a fluke, an accident that was taking place in a backwater of the psychiatric field, it is well to note at this time that Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association (in 1953) and was the first-ever president of the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron was famous, honored, well-respected by his peers, and a consummate politician. This was not a defrocked, dishonored crackpot who had lost his medical license over a botched, back alley abortion. This was the Chairman of the Board.

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Many of Cameron’s former colleagues still will not talk; many have since died or left the country. As mentioned before, Gordon Thomas has revealed that several of the latter found employment with Latin American dictators and their secret police.

Interestingly, Cameron's own program may help point to some of the causes of prevalent abuse among the Catholic clergy, in particular a notorious and horrific case in 1950s Montreal:

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During the postwar years in Montreal, money was in short supply. Funding for orphanages was virtually non-existent, but funding for hospitals was available from the central government in Ottawa. The Catholic Church decided to take advantage of the disparity in funding by classifying its orphans as “mentally deficient,” thus qualifying for the federal largesse. The government in Montreal—specifically the administration of Premier Maurice Duplessis—was the instigating factor, since it offered the Church a subsidy of $2.75 per day per “mental deficient” as opposed to only $1.25 per day per orphan. The Church immediately took advantage of this policy, and reclassified thousands—estimates range as high as 5,000—of orphans and illegitimate children in its care as mental patients (usually without any medical or psychiatric examination whatsoever). If this was strictly an exercise in paperwork, with no one the wiser—a pragmatic attempt to secure funding for the support of children whose only crime in the eyes of society was that they existed—then perhaps one could have turned a blind eye to the whole proceeding. However, the reclassification process prompted acts of horrific brutality against the children by nuns, the “brides of Christ,” and in some cases monks and lay helpers.

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Once the papers had been signed and, in some cases, entire orphanages converted to mental institutions virtually overnight, the horrors began. Children were beaten, in some cases with chains; they were tied to iron bed frames and force-fed; put in straitjackets; subjected to ice baths; and sodomized. Some died from the abuse. Others became severely disabled, to the point that now—over fifty years after the events—they are still taking anti-depressants and are unable to hold regular jobs. One man still suffers from testicular problems due to the beatings. Of course, as they were officially listed as “mentally retarded” or “mentally deficient,” they were considered marginal members of society and could not obtain decent education or the other benefits of “normal” children and adults. In fact, once they were officially designated “retarded,” it was felt that there was no longer any need to educate them, and in many cases schooling of these children was cancelled completely. Some of these victims—at the time of this writing, in their 50s and 60s—still cannot read or write. In many other cases, the children were labeled retarded when they were quite young, so they had no reason to believe they were not retarded. When some of these bewildered men and women were interviewed for national television in the mid-1990s, their confusion and anger were apparent. Their lives had been destroyed, if not by the physical, mental and sexual abuse, then by the label of “mentally deficient” or “mentally retarded” which followed them all through life.

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The Allan Memorial Institute was in full flower at the same time that the atrocities were being committed against the Children of Montreal, and in the same city; an institute run by the world-renowned psychiatrist and specialist in mental disorders, Dr. Ewen Cameron.

Proven link between the two? No. But recall:

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It is also well-known that the status of nuns within the Catholic Church is very low: the lowliest priest has more status in the ecclesiastical hierarchy than the most mature Mother Superior. That the abuse of these children could take place without the knowledge or consent (tacit or implicit) of the priesthood is simply not possible. So, how was this long—nearly twenty years or more—institutionalized horror allowed to take place?

The American national security establishment did not just take an interest in crude, mechanistic interpretations of psychology, though. And this is where the story gets really weird:

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However, there was a band of scientists and explorers loyal to the American government who felt the need to bring together the purely mechanistic and behaviorist approach to psychology that was being endorsed by the CIA on the one hand with the deeper, more analytical and Jungian approach on the other. The ideal discipline to cement this union and to demonstrate the utility of occult practices was the relatively new science of parapsychology. Parapsychology was concerned with bringing the psychic abilities and practices of certain powerful individuals into the clinic for measurement and testing. What seemed like a series of tame experiments in ESP turned into something quite different as the years wore on, and some of these government scientists became scalded by their exposure to the heat and light of powers beyond their imagining. One of these was a friend and, in some sense, a colleague of Aldous Huxley: Dr. Andrija Puharich.

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The story of Puharich is central to any study of the US government’s postwar interest in how psychology and parapsychology could benefit the intelligence agencies. It was arguably Puharich who was the first to bring the potential uses of paranormal abilities in military applications to the attention of the United States Navy; it was Puharich who introduced the Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, to American audiences… and to American intelligence. Further, it was Puharich who formed a mysterious cabal that numbered many important and influential Americans among its members, a cabal that would deliberately attempt to make contact with alien beings and—according to some commentators—actually succeed. This cabal included a man with shadowy connections both to Operation Paperclip on the one side… and to the Kennedy assassination on the other.

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In tandem with his work in New York City with McCulloch, Puharich formed the Round Table Foundation of Electrobiology in Camden in 1948, an organization whose name was usually shortened to the Round Table, or the Round Table Foundation. Thus, the hospital or clinic that had been originally planned became instead a kind of research institute specializing in the more arcane of the behavioral sciences, from cybernetics to ESP, and moved from the barn—which he lost due to some unpleasantness concerning Red baiting in the small New England town—to somewhat grander quarters in a twenty-two room house. One of the earliest members of the Round Table was Aldous Huxley, and one of his earliest experiments was with the psychic Eileen Garrett, who was placed in a Faraday Cage to test her psychic abilities, as were such other famous names in the field as Peter Hurkos and Harry Stone. In order to support his research, Puharich approached a variety of individuals for funding, including Henry Wallace. Wallace had been Secretary of Agriculture in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration and later his Vice President. Under Truman, Wallace had been Secretary of Commerce, and in 1948 ran for President himself on the Progressive Party ticket. Wallace’s name is usually associated with a scandal involving a Russian mystic, one Nicholas Roerich. (Wallace himself is usually credited with coming up with the pyramid and all-seeing eye design used on the back of the US dollar bill.) There is not enough space here to go into the whole story of Roerich; suffice it to say he was a painter and a mystic on the order of Gurdjieff, who became friendly with Wallace. He and Wallace had discussed how to Christianize Mao’s China, and it is believed that Wallace sent Roerich on special missions to Tibet and Mongolia with this in mind, since he believed that evidence pointing to the Second Coming of Christ would be found in those Asian countries.

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Another mysterious donor to the Foundation was one Walter Cabot Paine, of Boston, who donated $3,000. When a researcher attempted to interview Walter Paine, he was rebuffed immediately, and Paine did not answer any questions.

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W. C. was directly related to Ruth Forbes Paine Young’s previous husband, George Lyman Paine (who is also descended from Colonial American “royalty,” the Lyman family). Her son by that previous marriage, Michael Paine, married one Ruth Hyde. The reason for this heredity lesson is simple. In 1963, Michael and Ruth Hyde Paine befriended two poor immigrants from the Soviet Union: one Russian woman, Marina, and her American-born husband, Lee Harvey Oswald. The documents concerning the Paines and their relatives were sealed by the Warren Commission, and even District Attorney Jim Garrison could not get access to them when needed.

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At one point, Puharich claimed he was researching psychic abilities for the US Navy in 1948, for something called Project Penguin. The Navy has denied that any such program existed, and indeed there does not seem to be any documentation available to prove Puharich’s statement. However, what can be proved is that in November 1952 Puharich briefed Pentagon officials on the military uses of parapsychology. His talk was published as “An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare.” That talk was reported in the Washington Post on August 7, 1977, at a time when MK-ULTRA revelations were coming fast and furious.

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His presentation to the Pentagon was in November of 1952; according to his own account in The Sacred Mushroom, the orders had been cut to redraft him into the Army the following day, thus implying a specific agenda for Puharich. That December he would begin observing the trance state of one Dr. Vinod (whom he had first met in New York in December 1951) and make contact with what he believed were extraterrestrial forces.

There is no other way to understand what Puharich was doing at Edgewood Arsenal—of all places—except to admit that he was working for the CIA, the US Army, or some combination of the two, just as Olson was doing. This is exactly what his colleagues insisted was the case, and this would mean that the intelligence community’s interest in mind control and in mechanical means of controlling memory and volition was running parallel with its psychic research as long ago as the early 1950s.

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On February 16, 1952—Puharich is very specific about the date—he had his first “reading” by Dr. D. G. Vinod, a Hindu scholar “and sage” from Poona, India, who channeled spiritual forces. Dr. Vinod held Puharich’s right ring finger at the middle joint, and then began reading his past and future. According to Puharich, Vinod went into a trance, from where he was able to recite Puharich’s life in detail “as though he were reading out of a book.” Vinod then went on to predict a rosy future for Puharich, and they made plans to meet again to probe this ability further.

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At precisely 9 P.M. on New Year’s Eve, then, the Indian gentleman began channeling something that called itself The Nine. “M. calling. We are Nine Principles and Forces,” the channeled entity began, and thus was born the saga of The Nine. The reader may be forgiven for wondering what all of these gentlemen were doing alone on New Year’s Eve, holding a séance in a house in the Maine woods. (Sadly to say, the author has had worse New Year’s Eves.)

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After Vinod’s—or, should we say, “M’s”—initial pronouncement that they were talking with The Nine, there followed a short discourse on the nature of The Nine in the type of language with which philosophy majors are comfortable, replete with terms like ontology and teleology, which then evolved into a form of the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation equation and a tantalizing reference to its application to the “problem” of the “superconscious.” The Nine offered to work with Puharich to solve some of the problems he was working on at the time.

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Some months later, on June 27, 1953, the night of the full moon, Puharich gathered around him what was to be a core group of the Round Table Foundation for another session with Vinod. The membership of this group of nine members—á la The Nine—is illuminating. Henry Jackson, Georgia Jackson, Alice Bouverie, Marcella Du Pont, Carl Betz, Vonnie Beck, Arthur Young, Ruth Young, and Andrija Puharich. Dr. Vinod acted as the medium.

And those are some very interesting names indeed:

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Alice Bouverie was born Ava Alice Muriel Astor, and was a descendant of John Jacob Astor, and the daughter of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, builder of the Astoria Hotel and author of the book A Journey To Other Worlds (1894); her father was also one of the ill-fated passengers aboard the Titanic when it went down in April 1912. She had a reputation for her interest in the occult, as well as an interest in the institution of matrimony, for she married and divorced four times before her death in 1956 at the age of 54. Interestingly, her first husband was an officer in the Czarist Army, Prince Serge Obolensky. Obolensky was an intelligence officer during World War II and “headed the OSS Operational Groups which worked with the French Maquis at the time of the Normandy invasion.” 13He also parachuted behind enemy lines in Sardinia to inform the Italian garrison there that Italy had switched sides and abandoned the Nazis. A dashing sophisticate, he was a fanatic anti-Communist and, at the same time, a “darling of the New York social set.” It was Obolensky who translated a secret Russian copy of Mao Ze Dong’s guerrilla warfare manual. Thus, Ms. Astor’s intelligence connections were on a par with those of Puharich and Paine, making The Nine look like a prayer meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

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Arthur Young was a famous inventor, one of the men credited with creating the Bell Helicopter. For some reason, Young left Bell Helicopter after the end of the Second World War before the time that Walter Dornberger—Nazi scientist and slave labor czar of Peenemuende fame—took up residence there as a member of the Board. Rather than continue in the field of aviation mechanics and design, Young dropped out of the military-industrial complex and began to devote himself to a spiritual quest which lasted the rest of his life.

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Henry Jackson was Puharich’s administrator and was married to Georgia Jackson. Carl Beck was involved in alternate energy research, and had visited the laboratory of one Thomas Henry Molay, a Mormon scientist and ersatz alchemist living in Salt Lake City who claimed to have identified a source of “free energy” which he termed “radiant energy.” Developing alternate energy sources (á la Nicola Tesla) would be a preoccupation of Puharich in the years to come. (The only member of the original Nine that the author has been unable to satisfactorily identify is Vonnie Beck, who may have been the same Vonnie Beck who was a pilot for the US Navy during World War II, but at this time there is no further information on Beck.)

So, these rather illustrious personalities were brought together and told....

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What Vinod (or, actually “R”) was telling the assembled group is that they were to be reborn as spiritual Brahmins, in charge of bringing about a mystical renaissance on earth… under the mentorship of The Nine, of course. “R” then made an allusion to alchemy and transformation, and then a reference to Buddha.

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Gradually, over a period of time, The Nine revealed themselves as extraterrestrial beings living on an immense spacecraft hovering invisibly over the planet. The assembled congregation had been selected to promote the agenda of The Nine on earth. As Puharich would later write in his biography of Uri Geller, “We took every known precaution against fraud, and the staff and I became thoroughly convinced that we were dealing with some kind of an extraordinary extraterrestrial intelligence.” This belief was reinforced by events that took place over the next twenty years, culminating in the Uri Geller experience, when it seemed there were UFOs following everyone around, from Israel to South America to New York State. Indeed, Puharich became obsessed with The Nine, seeing them behind every psychic encounter, every UFO sighting, every paranormal event.

For example:

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While in the town of Acambaro, he and Hurkos ran into an American couple from Arizona who eventually claimed that they had been receiving instructions from The Nine. Neither Puharich nor Hurkos had ever met these people before, but it seems they were working with a medium back in Arizona who was also channeling The Nine. To prove this, they sent letters to Puharich the following month with sealed communications from The Nine that referred to details of the specific séances that Puharich had chaired back in Maine. This was the proof that Puharich was looking for. The details went so far as to include a variation of the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation formula that had formed part of the first séance.

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If we do not want to give The Nine the benefit of a doubt, we can assume that the medium who was working with the Arizona couple—the Laugheads of Whipple, Arizona (which sounds fishy anyway)—was the same Dr. Vinod, for no one else would have the information. Puharich insists that no one from his laboratory had leaked the details of the séance to anyone; but we never learn what happened to Dr. Vinod. Yet, if this were the case, what was Vinod up to? And for whom? Was this a kind of double-blind experiment on Puharich, conducted by the Army or CIA? Was Dr. Vinod a plant? Unfortunately, there is no way to answer these questions now without more documentation about the Army, the Navy and the CIA’s mind control programs, and in most cases this documentation has been destroyed.

Yet more mysteriously destroyed series of files. YOU'VE PAPER-SHREDDED TOO MUCH AND CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

George de Mohrenschildt is one of the most enigmatic characters in the entire assassination scenario. A White Russian himself, a petroleum engineer, an entrepreneur, a world traveler, multilingual, suspected of Nazi sentiments, he cooperated with American intelligence on more than one occasion in his life. His motives for introducing the Oswalds to the Paines is unclear. He has told the story several different ways. When finally he was about to be brought before the House Sub-Committee on Assassinations in 1977 to tell the whole story, he committed suicide or, as some theorists insist, was murdered; it is true that the forensic evidence is suspicious, but either way—suicide or murder—the event is sufficiently alarming and suggestive of deeper, darker secrets.

The Paines played quite the role in the whole post-assassination drama.

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When he [Oswald] returned to Dallas, he took up residence in a rooming house, once Ruth Paine had managed to network him into the Texas School Book Depository, and Marina remained with Ruth at Irving. When the assassination occurred, it was the Paines who led the police officers to the place (and the blanket) where Lee had supposedly stored his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

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In fact, Ruth Paine was more than helpful. Much of the evidence that would eventually damn Oswald in the eyes of the Warren Commission (and the public) came from Ruth Paine: some of the famous photographs of Oswald posing with the rifle and copies of a Communist newspaper, the “spy camera,” the fake Alex Hidell documents, and much else besides. There is even a growing body of evidence that Michael Paine’s father—George Lyman Paine, who was a Trotskyite leader in California—had intelligence connections that led straight back to William Buckley, Jr. and E. Howard Hunt, through one James Burnham, who was George Paine’s colleague in the Trotskyite party to which they both belonged, and who was also a consultant to the CIA and a friend of E. Howard Hunt of Watergate “Plumber” fame.

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It was Michael Paine who took Oswald to his first ACLU meeting. It was also Michael Paine who took Oswald to his first John Birch Society meeting. It was Michael Paine who engaged Oswald in political discussions in front of witnesses.

Ruth Paine also seems to have a guardian angel in the person of Allen Dulles:

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Dulles becomes helpful to Ruth Paine’s testimony on more than one occasion. Each time her Russian language tutor is mentioned, Dulles heads off the line of questioning by asking something else before Ruth can answer. This happens first on page 467 of Volume II of the Warren Commission Hearings, and then again on page 473.

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When the Commission finally did get around to asking Ruth Paine about her Russian language tutor, Dulles was conveniently absent from the hearings that day. Why would Dulles take such a particular interest in Ruth Paine if, in fact, he did? Was he afraid that something said about the Russian language tutor in his presence would reflect badly on him later on? Was he aware of Ruth Paine’s august family connections back in Philadelphia? Or did it have something to do with Michael Paine?

And this is what the Russian tutor actually had to say:

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Mrs. Gravitis spoke with Marina on the phone twice, and never met her, but they discussed Lee from a perspective that should have been very disturbing to the Commission, but which seems to have been passed over. When asked by the Commission why she decided to distance herself from Marina before the assassination, she said it was because of Marina’s remarks concerning Lee Oswald. Marina had used a very specific term in Russian to describe Lee’s political beliefs. This word is not easily translatable into English, and her interpreter—Mamantov—had difficulty with it. It is a word that signifies that Lee was in the second phase of becoming a member of the Communist Party, the phase where he had to prove himself to the Party in some material way. In the Soviet Union of Mrs. Gravitis’ experience, that usually meant spying.

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Another possibility, also never followed up, is that Oswald told Marina this story in order to direct her away from his real activities, which also included spying not on the White Russian community but for a faction of the US government. As former CIA officer Victor Marchetti revealed in an interview to assassination researcher Anthony Summers, the US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had a program in place in the 1960s to place phony defectors in the Soviet Union. These included between thirty and forty young men who were “made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about.” 10From every indication, it would appear that the twenty-year-old Oswald fit the profile exactly. Add to that the fact that the period in which he defected was a time of numerous defections of US military and intelligence personnel to the Soviet Union, and the shoe fits.

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His erstwhile friend, the White Russian George de Mohrenschildt, found Oswald to be intelligent and well-spoken; it was also de Mohrenschildt who, it was later discovered, was reporting on Oswald to American intelligence in the months prior to the assassination; it is also de Mohrenschildt who, from his writings and remarks to various investigators and journalists, gives the impression that he was saddened—perhaps even guilty—about what happened to Oswald.

Arther Young's involvement also links the Kennedy assassination back to "The Nine":

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The author would like to propose that the connection to Arthur Young through the Paines is a smoking gun, indicative of another level of covert activity that has not been explored by the Warren Commission or by the later House Sub-Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Arthur Young’s travels with Andrija Puharich to Mexico and elsewhere, and his long support of Puharich’s Round Table Foundation, as well as his inclusion in the first “séance of The Nine,” may reveal an intelligence operation—a truly bizarre intelligence operation—that is connected to the Oswald affair.

And here's a bit of weirdness:

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There is another strange aspect to the question of the Paines that is worth a brief look, even though it is perhaps too bizarre to take seriously. One of the most mysterious of the many Aleister Crowley mysteries is that of a section of his famous Book of the Law, specifically Book Two, Verse 76. This verse reads, 76.4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meanest this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. The verse is commonly referred to—by Thelemites—as “R P Stoval” after the last group of letters. No one knows what it means, although many have claimed to decode the enigmatic phrase. A photograph found in the Paine home—a photograph of a ’57 Chevrolet in the driveway of General Walker, the man Oswald is supposed to have fired upon and missed in the weeks leading up to the assassination—was mutilated. The license plate had been removed from the photo so that it would be impossible to identify. The Dallas detective who seized the photo from the Paine home and put it into evidence claimed that it was already mutilated; Marina Oswald denied this and later evidence—a photo of the photo, to be precise—shows that Marina was telling the truth. The photograph when it came into custody of the Dallas police was intact; someone in the department must have chopped the license number out of the picture. The Dallas police detective who confiscated the photo and who subsequently lied by stating that it arrived in his possession in its mutilated state was one R. B. Stovall. In addition, Oswald worked for a photographic firm in Dallas that had Defense Department contracts: Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. The job had been arranged for Oswald by George de Mohrenschildt. In de Mohrenschildt’s entire existence, as with so much else surrounding Oswald, we seem to be looking at a kind of voodoo.

The involvement of White Russians with Oswald also leads to the role of the various Orthodox Churches in the fight against Communism:

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This use of Orthodox churches in the fight against Communism was more widespread than most Americans realize, simply because to them the Eastern Orthodox church is too ethnic, too mysterious to understand. Eventually, though, such famous names in the Kennedy assassination investigation as David Ferrie would be revealed as players in this strange underworld of archaic ritual, dead languages, and wandering bishops.

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Ferrie’s name had been dropped as a friend of both Guy Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald by one Jack Martin, who worked for Guy Banister (he of the FBI UFO files) as some sort of ersatz investigator. Martin himself had worked with Ferrie on an investigation involving diploma mills and fraudulent ecclesiastical papers. Well, they claimed it was an investigation. It was obviously more than that. It seems that both Martin and Ferrie were only too happy to acquire these paper dignities themselves. Ferrie and Martin had both come to the attention of the Warren Commission briefly, and then were dropped as suspects. They both came under Jim Garrison’s microscope later on, but Ferrie died before he could testify. Garrison claimed that Ferrie was one of the most important people in history, but that might have been hyperbole. He was certainly one of the strangest.

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One of the intriguing aspects of the Ferrie case to the author—and to very few others—was his membership in a church and his status as a bishop. This rang alarm bells, since the author himself has direct and personal experience of the church to which Ferrie was admitted and in which he was consecrated. This church is referred to in the journalistic accounts of the assassination by all sorts of names, such as the Old Catholic Church or the Holy Apostolic Church, etc., etc., but in testimony obtained by the FBI it is clear that David Ferrie was a bishop in the American Orthodox Catholic Church, and therein lies a tale. The American Orthodox Catholic Church was founded by Walter (Vladimir) Propheta, a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church whose father was also a priest. (In Eastern Orthodox churches, priests are allowed to be married and raise families, provided they are married before they are ordained; married men are not, however, allowed to become bishops.) Walter Propheta was a sincere and dedicated anti-Communist, as were most Ukrainians who lived in the United States during the time of the Soviet Union. Propheta had gone on television in its early days to promote a strong, anti-Communist message. He had arranged for a documentary to be made on the Katyn Forest Massacre, and had appeared with Dave Garroway to discuss the evils being perpetrated against Ukraine and other “Captive Nations” by the Communists. In fact, Propheta once showed the author a letter from Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, promising Propheta that he would be the White House chaplain should Dewey win the election against Truman. According to Propheta, he was packing his suitcase to go to Washington when the news came that Truman had won. As it happens in the churches, celebrity can be the kiss of death when it comes to advancement in the hierarchy. Propheta wanted to be consecrated bishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but for some reason (canonical or otherwise) it didn’t happen. Upset, he broke away to form his own church, the American Orthodox Catholic Church, which would be an Orthodox Church conducting its services in English (a rather novel idea at the time). The Church’s headquarters were on East 183rd Street in the Bronx, at the Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection, a former Protestant church with an interior covered in crayon-colored ikons, quite close to the Bronx Zoo and also comfortably near Arthur Avenue, a famed Italian neighborhood with great bakeries and restaurants. The church, however, had very few—if any—parishioners. It did have, however, an embarrassingly large number of bishops. At the headquarters alone—in the period 1968-69 when the author was there frequently—there was Propheta himself, Bishop Leonard G. Hill and Bishop John Christian Chiasson as the regular staff. There were no priests, deacons, altar boys, or anyone else for that matter. But there were American intelligence officers. According to Propheta, there was one FBI agent and one CIA agent on the Church’s Board of Directors. This may have been simple boasting, but the author was introduced to both during his tenure at the Church. In fact, they were involved at the time in trying to buy a former mental hospital in New Jersey on behalf of the Church (for which purpose the author never knew), and once broached the subject to two young priests, wondering if they could sign the purchase agreement in order to disguise the agents’ involvement. When they discovered that the two priests were only eighteen years old at the time, and thus could not sign legal documents in the State of New Jersey, the matter was dropped. The two young priests, however, went on to greater glory—and notoriety—in the years that would follow.

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Back in the 1960s there was a very popular book—in certain circles—entitled How To Become a Bishop Without Being Religious. This book humorously discussed the ease with which one could become a clergyman, particularly a bishop, and all the perks that went with it. It was read avidly by a strange circle of very strange men—of which David Ferrie was a member—known as the Episcopi Vagantes, or “wandering bishops.” These were men who had either invented their own Church and named themselves as its bishops or who, more often, joined churches already in existence and (for a fee, or for some service) were consecrated as bishops by other bishops. There is a certain degree of sadness in contemplating the type of individual who would lust so mightily for the bishop’s robes but be otherwise incapable or unqualified to be even an altar boy, much less a priest and much, much less a bishop. Some of these men gave themselves outlandish titles, such as Patriarch or Archbishop; some were janitors, convicted criminals, or the borderline insane. Still others were intelligence agents.

Does This Remind You Of Anything?

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This is what happened with Propheta. He had to secure valid consecration, and he did so at the hands of an occultist, a man who ran one of the oddest of odd churches in Manhattan, an Orthodox Church which was at the same time the local headquarters of the SRIA: the Societas Rosicruciana In America, or “the Rosicrucian Society of America.” 13 The SRIA. was an occult lodge founded in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of a British lodge, the Societas Rosicruciana In Anglia (also known as SRIA). The British SRIA was the breeding ground of the Golden Dawn, which itself was the breeding ground of Aleister Crowley. Without going into too much detail about the creation and history of these orders, which is certain to bore and confuse the reader, let us summarize by saying that the head of the American SRIA was, for quite some time, one George Winslow Plummer, a devoted occultist and Hermeticist who edited a magazine of things alchemical and Rosicrucian called Mercury. Plummer was also interested in Christian mysticism, and aligned himself with several renegade Christian churches, including something called the Holy Orthodox Church. He was also a member of Aleister Crowley’s OTO, and thus fits the mold of occultists everywhere: the inveterate joiner and accumulator of dignities. Plummer died in 1944, and was succeeded in the SRIA by his widow, the ethereal Mother Serena, who played the organ at the Church’s headquarters at 321 West 101st Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the author knew her. Mother Serena later married Theodotus Stanislaus de Witow (1890-1969), who then became the Patriarch of the Holy Orthodox Church, as well as the head of the SRIA until his death in 1969. Propheta was ordained a Ukrainian Orthodox priest by Bishop Bohdan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on May 15, 1933. At this time, and until 1964, Propheta was still within the ecumenical fold. But things became strange after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and Propheta sought other alliances; the details are not too well known. Propheta was consecrated bishop of the American Orthodox Church on October 3,1964 by Archbishop Joachim Souris of the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of America and by the aforementioned Archbishop De Witow of the Holy Orthodox Church in America; he then incorporated the American Orthodox Church as the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC) in New York, and thus entered the document stream as one of America’s foremost bishop mills. Archbishop Joachim Souris was himself made a bishop by Metropolitan Peter Zhurawetzky and two Old Roman Catholic Church bishops who traced their lineage through the inescapable Rene Villate, a famous name in wandering bishop circles, as are Zhurawetzky and Propheta themselves. The Old Roman Catholic Church is the American incarnation of the famous Jansenist heresy, and according to most authorities they have maintained valid apostolic succession through their bishops who were—originally, at the time of the heresy—validly consecrated. It was the Old Roman Catholic Church more than any other group who popularized the idea that one could be a “real” priest and a “real” bishop without belonging to the “real” Catholic Church or any of the legitimate Eastern Orthodox Churches. Once that was accepted, it was only a matter of time before a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon, obtained “real” consecrations and set up their own churches, usually aligning themselves with other “real” bishops in order to consecrate even more bishops… who would found their own churches… and so it goes.

Don't worry too much about the above if it doesn't interest you:

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Anyone trying to make sense out of the foregoing, or to follow the richly entangled web of consecrations, cross-consecrations and affiliations has the author’s condolences.

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Before Propheta was consecrated bishop, another representative of the American Orthodox Church (soon to become the American Orthodox Catholic Church) was making a name for himself and has now become—if you are one of the faithful—a saint. This is Carl J. Stanley, who became Archbishop Christopher Maria (now Saint Christopher Maria, canonized—by someone—on April 22, 1976). It was Carl Stanley who was referenced in the Warren Commission documents as the bishop who consecrated David Ferrie a bishop; a photograph of Stanley in his episcopal regalia will show a dignified looking sort (it’s hard not to look dignified in voluminous robes and heavy golden pendants, topped by a veiled hat of the Never On Sunday Greek variety) that one would hesitate to associate with anti-Castro gun runners.

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Stanley told the FBI that he consecrated David Ferrie as a bishop in July of 1961, but then removed him from that office the following January when Stanley learned of Ferrie’s homosexuality. When the author first read Stanley’s statement, he burst out laughing. Homosexuality was never a bar to either ordination or consecration at the American Orthodox Catholic Church

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Even if the Itkin episode never happened, the history of the American Orthodox Catholic Church (indeed, of all the “wandering bishop” dioceses) is replete with instances of every form of sexual expression. (It’s not for nothing that Propheta’s headquarters—the Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection—was known as “the Cathedral of the Holy Erection” in wandering bishop circles.) Thus, there is no question in the author’s mind that Ferrie was never defrocked or deposed or in any way removed from office due to homosexuality, and it is doubted that he was ever removed at all, for any reason. If he was, he would have been the first (and probably only) person ever kicked out of the wandering bishops’ club. To be fair, Stanley and Itkin “parted ways” soon after Itkin’s consecration: evidently because Stanley found Itkin’s activism a little too “up front” for 1960, and Itkin joined yet another church, finally (at the time of this writing) winding up with the “Moorish” diocese above-mentioned, which is actually a sect with heavy cultic overtones, being a survival of something called the Moorish Temple. The Moorish Temple was the progenitor of what would become the Nation of Islam; a West Coast mystic who called himself Hakim Bey revived the Temple and made it a catch-all for occultists, magicians, Christian mystics, Islamic mystics, homosexual mystics, and assorted counter-culture types.

Hmm, Hakim Bey and self-ordained bishops with outlandish titles and strange beliefs. DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR IN ANY WAY?

Regardie was initiated into a Rosicrucian group in Washington, D.C. in 1926, a group that leads us right to David Ferrie and from him to the assassination itself. Regardie had been in contact with a group of Golden Dawn hopefuls in Dallas in the early 1960s; they had hoped to have Regardie teach them how to pronounce the Hebrew words that are so much a staple of Golden Dawn and other Hermetic literature. Regardie suggested they simply go to a local synagogue and get someone there to help them; but the Dallas group insisted and thus forked over a $500 per diem for two days, plus all expenses to bring Regardie to Dallas. Regardie made friends in Dallas that day, and had stayed in touch with them until the day he died.

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Thus, Ferrie and Regardie—while probably not knowing each other—were brothers under the sign of the Rose and the Cross. Ferrie’s interest in occultism is hinted at by the people who knew him. It is known that he considered himself something of a hypnotist as well as a psychotherapist… or at least used these dubious qualifications as a lure for potential sexual partners. According to Perry Russo—one of Jim Garrison’s witnesses during the Clay Shaw trial, and not necessarily the most reliable or credible of those witnesses in the eyes of many investigators—Ferrie conducted the equivalent of Black Masses in his apartment at the appropriately-numbered 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, New Orleans.

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it is worth quoting his transcript of Perry Russo’s description of Ferrie’s weekly Black Masses: The chalice featured animal blood, the wafer consisted of some kind of raw flesh, instead of cake or bread. “He wore a little black toga, solid black. He wore nothing underneath. …he called it the American Eastern Catholic Orthodox Church… after all the ritual, shouted ritual… it ends up and it’s a brutal thing, a sadistic quality to it—bloodletting, chicken killing, stuff like that….”

Levenda speculates this might have been Santeria of some sort, rather than an actual Black Mass. He does note, however:

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To most people, the association of hard-core occultists and members of secret societies and Masonic groups such as the SRIA, the Golden Dawn and the OTO with the Old Roman Catholic Church, the American Orthodox Catholic Church, and—God help us—the Moorish Orthodox Diocese of Ong’s Hat and Montclair, New Jersey would seem to be illogical. Why would occultists and magicians hunger after “apostolic succession,” mitres, cassocks, croziers and panagias? The answer is simple, and sinister. The Black Mass which Ferrie was accused of performing is a ritual that mocks those of the Catholic Church; essentially, it is an attempt at organized blasphemy, an attack of rebellion, political as well as theological. It is also designed to attract demonic influences, evil spirits and the souls of the angry dead. Yet, this ritual carries very little weight if performed by a lay-person. It is potentially quite powerful, however, if performed by an ordained priest.

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This should not be viewed as the sole objective, however. Many occultists value the line of succession as a source of spiritual power whether or not they consider themselves Christian. Power is power, wherever it is found and by whatever means it can be obtained; a validly ordained priest has the power to perform most of the sacraments, and the validly consecrated bishop has the power to perform all of the sacraments including ordaining more priests and consecrating more bishops, thus ensuring a line of power for his cult equal to that of the Catholic Church. The allure is irresistible.

Meanwhile, the intelligence links of the wandering bishops are documented:

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Propheta’s organization began fronting for intelligence agencies and setting up shop all over the world. The author has personal knowledge of several such instances, such as the improbable H.P. (“Holy Prophet”) Aluya, who came to the United States from war-torn Nigeria during the Biafran crisis. The author was on hand to welcome the Prophet at Kennedy Airport in New York in 1968, as were several members of the Nigerian Consulate. Aluya was brought to the Cathedral in the Bronx, consecrated a bishop, and sent back to Nigeria with a handsome document and photographs of the consecration. The author doubts whether the Holy Prophet was even a Christian, much less an Eastern Orthodox priest deserving of consecration as a bishop.

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Another instance was the synchronization of American intelligence goals with those of the Italian government around the same time. As is well-known, Italy in the 1960s was in the throes of an active and subversive Communist movement, and cover as priests for American agents in Italy was quite valuable, particularly if one did not have to deal with the cranky and bureaucratic Catholic Church itself. The Vatican was likely to exact a pound of flesh for every agent sent over under its cover; indeed, one could not be sure that the Vatican itself was not penetrated by agents of a hostile service. The author— due to his basic ability in the French language—was pressed into service as translator of communications from several suspect religious organizations in Europe and Africa, one of which was run by a bishop in what was then the Belgian Congo. This bishop had connections among another network that runs hand-in-hand with the wandering bishops, and that is the equally bizarre world of knighthoods and royal titles. For an unknown consideration, Propheta was to receive a Papal Knighthood from one Prince Policastro of Sicily. This had been arranged with the Belgian bishop aforementioned. This dignity was delivered to Propheta’s church by two gentlemen from the Italian Embassy in a limousine. The reason for this award is not known to the author; indeed, as an award it would not have been particularly necessary since Propheta had his own purveyor of knighthoods, baronetcies, dukedoms and other such endowments in the person of Bishop Pierre Michel Lorenzo de Valitch, a putative Serbo-Croatian Count who had been in the art gallery business years before, but who now ran a flourishing trade in bogus orders of knighthood for the rich and famous.

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Another suspect organization was the Greek Order of St. Denis of Zante, an organization that numbered the elusive Father Fox among its members. Father Fox had been a priest of various denominations, including the Syrian Orthodox Church, and had studied at Fordham University. He was fluent in several foreign languages, including Arabic and Russian, and had once been caught trying to cross the border into Northern Ireland in a car with a trunk full of weapons. Fox had made trips to Vietnam during the War, and one has the suspicion it was not as a tourist. In at least one episode, it became obvious to the author that Fox was working for American intelligence as an informant, if nothing else.

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Yet another personality close to the Propheta organization was the famous wrestler Antonino Rocca. Rocca—retired from wrestling at that time—claimed to be an agent of the CIA working out of Lebanon; he further claimed that he was running Phantom jets into Israel under diplomatic radar by having them shipped to Luxembourg first and then flying them into Israel, thus avoiding Arab spies and saboteurs, who would have been expecting a shipment from the United States or, at least, France or Great Britain. It also was a way of hiding the shipments from the US Congress, since the sales would not register as Israeli but as sales to Luxembourg. All of this would seem like outrageous posturing, except that Rocca made these statements before Rabbi A. Allen Block of the Brotherhood Synagogue in 1969, in a meeting including several of Propheta’s clergymen as well as the author.

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And what do we make of the strange association of David Ferrie—pilot, investigator, consecrated bishop, acquaintance of Lee Oswald, performer of Black Masses—with Guy Banister, former ONI, former FBI, former hunter of UFOs? And of Fred Crisman, author of the Maury Island Affair, former OSS, former CIA, reputed friend of Clay Shaw? UFOs and satanists, aliens and archbishops. Spies and soothsayers. Magicians… and Manchurian Candidates. Another Ferrie association—and another connection that was examined by Jim Garrison’s staff—was with a strange wandering bishop based in Canada: Bishop Earl Anglin Lawrence James. Ferrie had made a number of long-distance phone calls to James in the period 1962-63, and Garrison asked Metropolitan Toronto Police to follow up. The episode made the Toronto newspapers, and a report filed by the Toronto Telegram on November 6, 1967 was headlined “Toronto’s Renegade ‘Bishop’ Mentioned in Garrison Probe.” According to the paper, James “operates a bizarre school on Danforth Ave.” What newspapermen considered “bizarre” in Toronto in 1967 is anyone’s guess; not for nothing was the town known as “Toronto the Good” for many years. James denied any knowledge of Ferrie, and in fact denied he had ever been to New Orleans. That proved to be a dubious statement, since he was in possession of a Key to the City of New Orleans, had membership cards in various Louisiana and New Orleans organizations, including one naming him an “Honorary Attorney General” of the State of Louisiana, another that named him a Colonel on the staff of Earl K. Long, and possessed various other police and investigation agency paper litter, and including a United States Social Security card.

The interests of the Old Catholics and US intelligence agencies also overlapped in one significant area:

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The only clue we have to what was really going on with Holt, James, Stanley, Ferrie, Propheta, and the rest is the connection between the Old Roman Catholic Church and hypnosis, specifically the interests in hypnosis of not only Ferrie but also William Bryan, Jr., who claimed he was the technical advisor for the film version of The Manchurian Candidate. It was Bryan who worked a score of well-known criminal cases, including the Boston Strangler case, and who claimed he worked for the CIA. He claimed also to have hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan, something that could only have happened before the young Palestinian assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. As we shall see in the next chapter, Bryan was a member—and possibly a bishop—of the Old Roman Catholic Church.

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The religious, mystical dimension to this study leads in many directions. Suffice it to say that swirling about the feet and hands of the Kennedy assassination was a sticky fog of occultists, wandering bishops, American intelligence… and alien intelligence known as The Nine. Arthur Young, Michael Paine, Ruth Paine, Ruth Forbes Young, Andrija Puharich, Mary Astor, even David Ferrie were all a handshake or two away from Jack Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. They were all talking to ghosts, summoning alien beings, practicing ritual magic, holding hands around the séance table or sacrificing chickens in a New Orleans apartment.

The day after the assassination of President Kennedy, his former mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer phoned LSD guru Timothy Leary to tell him that the President was murdered by a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964) had once been married to CIA Chief of Covert Action Operations Cord Meyer, Jr. Cord Meyer, a former Marine lieutenant who was badly wounded on Guam in 1944, joined the CIA in late 1950 and gradually rose through the ranks, being at one time Chief of Station in London and later Deputy Director of Plans.

Mary Meyer also allegedly introduced Kennedy to weed and LSD.

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Mary Meyer was murdered less than a year after the Kennedy assassination—on October 12, 1964 (coincidentally Aleister Crowley’s birthday, and of course the day Columbus discovered America)—and her diary disappeared. She seemed to have been the victim of a mugging in Georgetown during the lunch hour, shot in the face at close range on a towpath, although the level of violence in the attack made it look suspicious to some, and the accused murderer was acquitted by a jury due to lack of evidence.

Well, that's not suspicious.

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But evidence later would show that the diary was found by her sister, and surrendered to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s paranoid Chief of Counter Intelligence and one of Cord Meyer’s closest friends, who had been in Mary Meyer’s apartment with a key long before her other friends arrived, looking for the same diary.

Well, that's not suspicious.

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Angleton did not destroy the diary, however. What he did with it while it was in his possession is open to debate, but he eventually gave it back to Tony Bradlee, who then destroyed it herself. It seems very odd that the Bradlees would have given the diary to Angleton to destroy in the first place; destroying a book is not exactly rocket science. It would have been a simple matter to rip out the pages and burn them, or flush them for that matter. But the diary went to Angleton, who took it to the CIA, who then did not destroy it, who then gave it back to the Bradlees to destroy.

Well, that's not...aw fuckit, this "repeating it until it appears true" shit doesn't work at all.

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Angleton’s fast trip to Mary Meyer’s home to find the diary suggests that he was worried about far more than a revelation that she had been sleeping with Jack Kennedy. One does not get the impression that Angleton would have been worried about Jack Kennedy’s reputation being tarnished; he would have been more worried about the intelligence implications of what would have been contained in the diary. The Warren Commission Report had been published the previous month. This was also during the time of the Nosenko debriefing, in which Angleton was certain KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was a plant, a false defector, sent by Moscow that January to do serious damage to the CIA. Angleton must have worried about the possible use Mary Meyer’s diary would be to Soviet intelligence, for the type of intelligence information contained therein (pillow talk with the most powerful man in the world until his assassination less than a year earlier) might well have been damaging to national security.

It was perhaps inevitable that Hubbard’s philosophy of enlightened self-interest would result in the Process Church of the Final Judgment, usually referred to simply as the Process. Formed sometime in 1963-64 as a splinter group from Scientology, its founder was Robert Moore, a British subject who was born in Shanghai on August 10, 1935 and had been—according to one account—a cavalry officer who had served time in Malaya (that favorite haunt of witchcraft guru Gerald Gardner, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess, and the Heart of Darkness’ Joseph Conrad), and who later lived in London at the time of the Process’ creation. At the Hubbard Institute of Scientology in London he met Mary Anne MacLean, a woman who is said to have been engaged to prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson in America for a brief period, before returning to England. Mary Anne MacLean was born in Glasgow on November 20, 1931, and was thus four years Robert Moore’s senior. Before she met Moore, however, she became involved with several high-ranking British politicians á la Christine Keeler of the Profumo affair.

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This, then, was the situation at the time Mary Anne MacLean met Robert Moore at Scientology headquarters in London; they then decided to break away, form their own operation, and get married. For someone like Mary Anne, it was probably a wise move: her profile in British society was not entirely low. Engaged to an American prizefighter, running in the same circles as Keeler and her associates, who were all being rounded up to “help the police in their inquiries,” it was a smart move to decamp to the Scientologists and marry an intelligent and charismatic architect like Robert Moore, as cover if nothing else. Further, the circumstances of the Profumo Affair and of Stephen Ward’s participation in it, suggested a far deeper political agenda that involved Jack Kennedy, the British government, the Soviet government, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as declassified FBI and CIA files suggest. It has also been revealed that Dr. Ward was the go-between for the British intelligence services and the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) via his friendship with Yevgeny Ivanov, and that possibly Ward had manipulated Keeler into sleeping with Ivanov as part of a classic “honey trap,” in case they needed to blackmail the Russian agent into defecting at some later date. War Minister Profumo was essentially caught in the middle, having also slept with the evidently irresistible Ms. Keeler.

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The philosophy of Robert and Mary Anne Moore (now known as Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston, a name of cultic significance to them) was a mixture of reincarnation, existentialism, some concepts adapted from Scientology, an attempt to merge the worships of Jehova and Lucifer, and a bit of neo-Nazi flavor. Their emblem was a stylized swastika, which in all fairness could have meant they were Buddhist; however, the philosophy of the Process and its alleged origins as a front for a German neo-fascist group, coupled with Mary Anne’s belief that she was the reincarnation of Josef Goebbels, seems to indicate a Nazi rather than a Buddhist inspiration. Further, the group was known to have kept thirty German shepherds on hand as a kind of totem-cum-guard dog arrangement.

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It was this very public association of German shepherds with the Process that would later lead some investigators in the United States to link Process members or former members with a series of sacrifices of these particular dogs where cult activity was believed to be taking place.

Yes, skinned and mutiliated German shepherds showed up a number of times in Terry Maury's investigation of the Son of Sam killings, and in the investigation of a Process splinter group in Southern California. Though as Maury, and others, have pointed out, does the sacrifice of said dogs imply a form of rejection of the original Process teachings?

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In 1967, the Process set up camp in San Francisco, a few doors down from where Manson was living at the time on Cole Street. By the spring of 1968, they were in Los Angeles, and making a frontal assault on the entertainment industry (something the DeGrimstons had perhaps learned during their sojourn at the Scientology operation). Dressed in black, German shepherds at the leash, and speaking about worshipping Jehova, Lucifer and Satan, they were a pretty common sight in California. In 1966, Anton LaVey had already opened his Church of Satan to much media hoopla in San Francisco, so Californians were getting used to Satan-worshippers and oddly-dressed, blackly-dressed young people working on their satanic stares while everyone else was working on their tans. And then, in the summer of 1968, the Californian operation of the Process suddenly went underground.

And who else apart from Manson and the Process had an interest in the occult and were hanging around in California in that time period? Well, practically everyone, but one particular infamous individual stands out:

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On May 28,1966, a young Palestinian immigrant fascinated with the occult had attended his first meeting of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) at the society’s Akhnaton Lodge in Pasadena, and was the subject of an experiment in sensory perception, sitting blindfolded while attempting to identify objects by touch.8 AMORC was one of the many splinter groups that broke off from the SRIA in England; they had OTO and Golden Dawn connections, but created a distinctly American style of recruiting: direct mail.

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In March 1968, the Palestinian was in Pasadena—where he lived with his mother, some blocks north of where Jack Parsons had lived in the 1940s and 1950s—attending a meeting of the Theosophical Society’s Adyar Lodge. (That same month, the Process set up shop on South Cochrane Street in Los Angeles.) A few months later, he would be arrested for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The Palestinian, of course, was Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

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Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the Process; Ed Sanders in the first edition of The Family links the Process with an amoebic network of death cults in California and from there to Manson; investigative journalist Maury Terry has linked them to Charles Manson as well as to the Son of Sam killings. The problem is that the linkages are there, but not enough to put a smoking gun in the hands of the Process itself. Of course, that is the problem with the entire field of conspiracy theory as well. What we are looking at in this case are mostly philosophical influences—which are certain to become a subject for academic study in another twenty or thirty years—and the “deep politics” connections of which Professor Peter Dale Scott writes so eloquently.

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The fidgety reader may complain that the American system of jurisprudence is such that one cannot be arrested on suspicion of undue influence over another; but, of course, that is exactly what happened in the case of Charles Manson, who did not actually murder anyone at the Tate or LaBianca households, but who was convicted of the murders anyway and would have been executed had not the State of California abolished the death penalty during his incarceration.

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The Charles Manson case is germane to the study of the Process, since Manson was known to them and had even written an article for the “Death” issue of their magazine (in all fairness, Marianne Faithfull and Salvador Dali also wrote for the Process magazine; however, what put scroungy little Charles Manson in the same company as Faithfull and Dali?); and, as his prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has written, members of the Process visited Manson in prison after his arrest for the Tate/LaBianca killings.

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(One of the murderous cults in California supposedly linked to Manson and to Maury Terry’s “Manson II” was something called “Four P.” A glance at the Process’ logo—the stylized swastika—will show it is basically four P’s in a circle.)

And a few years ago, there were rumours of a successor splinter group to Four P doing the rounds, including a password protected website. It may just have been a fake...I was unable to gain access either way

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In all of that ink, a lot of nonsense has been promulgated about the Process, as critics such as Robert Hicks have been quick to point out. That strange new breed of law enforcement officer, the “cult cop,” has been all over the Process, the OTO, and the Church of Satan, with seminar leaders telling wide-eyed police officers around the country that these cults are dangerous, using mind control methods, and committing murder and mayhem on a global scale. To anyone who has had any direct dealings at all with these groups, the accusations are absurd. The Church of Satan was at best a gimmicky New Age operation; at worst it was a magnet for the type of neurotics that LaVey himself would eventually banish. The OTO couldn’t organize a box lunch much less a nationwide program of human sacrifice. And the Process does not exist any longer, and hasn’t existed for almost thirty years. On the other hand… It is a fact of life that many people who join or are attracted to organizations like the three mentioned above are much more serious than their leaders. To judge all Church of Satan members by the writings or the actions of its founder, Anton LaVey, would be a mistake. LaVey, for instance, talked a good game, but it was little COS vampire Susan Atkins who plunged the knife into Sharon Tate, killing both the actress and her unborn child. To judge all OTO members by their leaders would be to reduce that organization’s reputation considerably. Jack Parsons and British occultist and author Kenneth Grant are good examples of people that the OTO administration did not like, but who have in past years become icons of the Order, and its best representatives. As for the Process, Robert Moore aka Robert DeGrimston has distanced himself completely from his creation. One published account even states that he was “purged” from the Church and that his wife, Mary Ann DeGrimston, took over and further emasculated the group. When critics of the cult cops rightly point to the many logical inconsistencies in the way the police describe the very cults they investigate, they ignore something darker that is taking place. Indeed, the Process was itself a splinter group of Scientology; the Church of Satan was a rebellion against Christianity; the OTO was an attempt to inject new life into dusty old Freemasonry. And these groups have spawned their own splinters, their own renegade branches that have taken the original ideas a step or two further and usually in a dangerous direction.

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To the outside world, these people are all “Process” or “Church of Satan” or even “OTO,” but in fact most of them have severed any formal links with these organizations before they began their criminal activity. What the occult Orders have done, however, deliberately or not, is provide these individuals—often more dedicated, more serious, even more charismatic than their own leaders—with the philosophical basis for their actions; in many cases, providing them with the ritual tools, jargon, and psychological conditioning necessary not only to perpetrate their crimes, but to scare the living daylights out of the rest of the population.

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Many people in the New York City area, including some very serious occultists, were originally drawn to the OTO when it made its resurgence in 1977. It was the time of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The hottest underground novel was Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, all about conspiracy theories, occultism, secret societies and consciousness expansion, with healthy dollops of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. The occult was on the increase, the Church of Satan was actively recruiting, as were the Wicca covens, and the OTO had decided to get back in the game after almost twenty years of lying low.

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But their membership roles were swollen by some very strange individuals. And these individuals attracted some even stranger hangers-on, who had expected to see in the OTO something more profound, more serious than they actually encountered. The exposure of these individuals to the Order at first stimulated them, but then they discovered that the rituals and the posing of the Order members—their pretension to spiritual powers and profound insights—were shallow, and so they adopted what they learned in the Order’s meetings and Gnostic Masses and from discussions with other serious members and fellow-travelers, and began to develop more serious programs of their own. The same was true of the Process. The same was true of the Church of Satan, in which case Michael Aquino broke away in search of something more intellectually stimulating and more powerful, creating the Temple of Set: a much more ambitious occult program than the more popular, showy Satanism of LaVey.

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Thus, there were OTO members (current or lapsed) involved with nefarious activities in New York City at the time of the Son of Sam murders. And there were some familiar faces at OTO gatherings who could also be found at producer and theatrical agent Roy Radin’s home on Long Island, for instance, including one young woman—a student at one of the Brooklyn schools of higher learning—who took her occultism very seriously, and who introduced the author to Roy Radin one afternoon when the latter was looking into the possibility of filming occult rituals. (Roy Radin figures prominently in Maury Terry’s theory of a nationwide network of Satanic killers, of which “Manson II” was a member.) None of this means that the OTO itself was officially involved in anything illegal. How does one separate the acts of the organization from the acts of its members, particularly when what we are speaking of is essentially a secret society?

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There can be no doubt that individual Process members were involved in some illegal acts; interviews conducted with a Process member a few years ago have categorically linked David Berkowitz and other “Son of Sam” killers to the Process, or to some faction thereof. 12Further, the murders of people linked to Berkowitz are evidence of a group at work and since nothing else seems to have characterized this group except murder and magic, then we are forced to make some unsettling assumptions. Indeed, a published personal account of the Process makes it clear that at least some members had knowledge that the Process was fronting for a German neo-Nazi operation in the 1960s. Founder Robert DeGrimston’s wife, Mary Anne, even claimed that she was a reincarnation of Nazi Propaganda Chief Josef Goebbels. The Process’ symbol—a stylized swastika—is further evidence of the group’s sentiments if not alignments; and their theology included worship of Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer while their magazine was a paean to Death, Fear, etc. To view the Process then as an amalgamation of Scientology with neo-Nazism puts us in a different realm: it raises the stakes. The neo-Nazi movement—both in Europe and in the Americas—has been violent, has been responsible for murder. Scientology members themselves have performed illegal acts in the United States, including breaking into US government offices and spying on government agents, former Scientology members, etc. What occurs is a unique social phenomenon that has been inadequately examined: it is the fact that these groups—which openly incorporate or idolize Lucifer, Satan, ancient Egyptian gods, Death, Fear, Nazi ideology, secret rituals and arcane initiations, and use what is sometimes a sophisticated, sometimes an ill-advised, series of psychological mechanisms such as hypnosis, auto-hypnosis, psychodrama, ritual sex, and potent hallucinogenic drugs to create altered states of awareness—thus may act as channels for sinister forces, forces they cannot control.